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COEXRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



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TWENTY SERMONS 



BY 



PHILLIPS BROOKS 

RECTOR OF TRINITY CHURCH, BOSTON 



FOURTH SERIES 



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NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

31 West Twenty-third Street 

1887 



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<#!&*« 
<&*-& ^ 



Copyright, 
By E. P. DUTTON & CO. 

1886. 



PRESS OF J. J. LITTLE & CO., 

NOS. IO TO 20 ASTOR PLACE, NEW YORK. 



LC Control Number 




tmp96 026519 



TO THE MEMORY OF 
I INSCRIBE THESE SERMONS. 



CONTENTS. 
SERMON I. 

Dtstmtg axtb @tok£- 

PAGE 

'While Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him, 
Behold, three men seek thee." — Acts x. 19 . . .1 

SERMON II. 

tlje Mottyf* Wonhzx. 

Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?" — Luke li. 48 . .20 
SERMON III. 

ffilje Cljurcij of ttje fffohtg- ffiok 

The Church of the living God."—l Tim. iii. 15 . . .42 
SERMON IV. 

Staribmg ftzfovz Qbob. 

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand he/ore God." — 
Revelation xx. 12 60 

SERMON V. 

Bnrtljjerljojoi) tn Cljrtst 

Simon, called Peter, and Andrew, his brother / James the son 
of Zebcdee, and John his brother." — Matthew x. 2 .76 

v 



vi Contents. 



SERMON VI. 

%\\t dMcmt itritd ijjje Mflmmbefc $eeL 

PAGE 

''And I will put enmity betiveen thee and the ivoman, and be- 
tween thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and 
thou shalt bruise his heel." — Genesis iii. 15. 93 

SERMON VII. 

®tje Sea jof ©lass jlingle*) nritlj iFire. 

"And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them 
that had gotten the victory over the beast". . . stand on 
the sea of glass, having the " harps of God." — Revelation 
xv. 2 110 

SERMON VIII. 

®lje ^Beautiful ©ate r>f tlje ®emple. 

" The Beautiful gate of the temple."— Acts iii. 10. . . . 127 

SERMON IX. 

Disciples attb Apostles, 

11 And when it was day he called unto him his disciples, and of 

them he chose twelve, whom also he named Apostles."— Luke 

vi. 13 152 

/ 

SERMON X. 

Stye CBartlj x>f ttje Keftempitrnt, 

" The heavens, even the heavens are the Lord's : but the earth 
hath he given to the children of men." — Psalm cxv. 16. . 173 

SERMON XI. 

Stye Man raitlj Ston ffialcnt*. 

" To another he gave two talents."— Matthew xxv. 15 . . 192 



Contents. vii 



SERMON XII. 

Destruction cmb fulfilment. 

PAGE 

" I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil." — Matthew v. 17. . 210 
SERMON XIII. 

jlctke tije itten Sit Dwwt. 

"And Jesus said, Make the men sit down." — John vi. 10. . 226 

SERMON XIV. 

^Timeliness* 

" He hath made everything beautiful in his time." — Ecclesias- 
tes iii. 11 244 

SERMON XV. 

®ije Sraoru fia%& in Ijecroen. 

li For my sword shall be bathed in heaven." — Isaiah xxxiv. 5. . 262 

SERMON XVI. 

®lje &tMt)ltbge jof Gbolb. 

" As the Father Jcnoweth me, even so Tcnow 1 the Father." — St. 
John x. 15 

" Then shall I Tcnow even as also I am Mown."— 1 Corinthi- 
ans xiii. 12 . . .280 

SERMON XVII. 

&n ffixiU Spirit frrmt tlje ftorb* 

" The spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit 
from the Lord troubled him." — 1 Samuel xvi. 14. . . 297 



viii Contents. 



SERMON XVIII. 
©ring *tp to Sernacdem* 

PAGE 

Then Jesus toolc unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, 
we go tip to Jerusalem, and all things that are written concern- 
ing the Son of man shall he accomplished." — Luke xviii. 30. 316 

SERMON XIX. 

®tj£ Safety cmb jjjelpfttlttm nf jFattij* 

'They shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing 
it shall not harm them. They shall lay hands on the sick and 
they shall recover." — Mark xvi. 18 333 

SERMON XX. 

®tye Otaat Gfepectattoit 

' Let your moderation he known unto all men. The Lord is at 
hand."— Phillippians iv. 4. . . . . . . 353 



SERMON I. 

" While Peter thought on the vision, the Spirit said unto him, Behold, 
three men seek thee." — Acts x. 19. 

THESE words recall to many of you a most fa- 
miliar picture, for the story of St. Peter's vision 
is one of those passages of the New Testament which 
have almost become the proverbs of mankind. Peter 
had been sitting on the top of Simon's house at Jaffa, 
and there had been shown to him the sight of the 
great sheet full of all living beasts, of which he had 
been bidden to take and eat. And when he hesi- 
tated, you remember how a voice had spoken to him, 
and rebuked the narrow punctiliousness with which 
he drew distinctions, and thought some of God's 
creatures clean and others unclean. He was sitting 
there, pondering this vision, "doubting in himself 
what the vision which he had seen should mean." 
A new idea had come to him. He saw it very vaguely ; 
and its developments, what it would lead to if he 
followed it out, he could not see at all. It was all 
abstract and impalpable. It just bewildered and 
eluded him. But as he sat there, steps were heard 
below, and to his mind the Spirit spoke, saying, 



Visions and Tasks. 



" Three men are asking for thee." They were the 
servants of Cornelius, the Gentile, coming to ask 
him to visit their master. Their visit gave him 
immediately the chance to put in action the idea 
which had possessed him. Our verse shows him 
then standing between the vision and its appli- 
cation. On the one side of him was the mysterious 
sheet full of the multitude of beasts; on the other 
side were the three men who needed just the princi- 
ple which the sheet-full of beasts involved. It was 
a critical moment. The question was whether the 
vision could pass through Peter to the three men 
and Cornelius. When on the morrow he " went away 
with them," the question was decided, and the idea 
and its appropriate duty had joined hands. 

Man standing between his visions and his tasks — 
that is the subject of our verse then. That is our 
subject for this morning. It is the place where 
certain men are often called upon peculiarly to 
stand ; and in some degree it is the place in which 
all men are standing always. For every man has 
visions, glimpses clearer or duller, now bright and 
beautiful, now clouded and obscure, of what is abso- 
lutely and abstractly true ; and every man also has 
pressing on him the warm, clear lives of fellow-men. 
There is the world of truths on one side, and there 
is the world of men upon the other. Between the 
two stands man; and these two worlds, if man is 
what he ought to be, meet through his nature. 

Think of an instance, and you will see what I 
mean. Here are you, a thoughtful, meditative man. 



Visions and Tasks. 



You have been pondering and studying. Some- 
how it has become clear to you, let us say, that 
there is a God. The supernatural behind the 
natural, the will behind all forces, has revealed 
itself to you. For the moment, it is enough for 
you just to know that mighty truth. Turning it 
this way and that, you think in one view and 
another how mighty it is. But very soon, if you 
are a true man, your nature begins to hear and feel 
a stir upon the other side of it. Under the win- 
dows which look towards the world, the tumult of 
the needy life of your fellow-men comes rising up 
to you. Perhaps it is more definite than that, and 
certain special fellow-men come, with footsteps which 
you can hear, up to your hearts' doors and knock. 
At first their coming seems to be only an intrusion. 
Why can they not leave you alone with your great 
idea ? What right have they to claim a share of 
the sunshine in which you are sitting ? But by- 
and-by you see more wisely. You begin to wonder 
whether their coming on this side of you is not the 
true correlative and correspondent of the coming of 
the vision on the other side of you. You begin to 
feel that the practical life may be needed to com- 
plete the meditative life. If you open the door to 
your intrusive fellow-men you find that it indeed is 
so. Your idea of God falling upon the many 
mirrors of their various needs and natures, gains 
new interpretations and illuminations. Their human 
hearts get hold of the reality of God, which they 
never could have found out for themselves, through 



Visions and Tasks. 



your belief in it. And your own life, open on both 
sides, on this side to the vision, and on that side to 
the men, grows rich and sacred as being the room 
in which that most deep and interesting transaction 
which the world can witness, the meeting of truth 
with the human mind, takes place. 

Truth is vague and helpless until men believe it. 
Men are weak and frivolous till they believe in 
truth. To furnish truth to the believing heart, and to 
furnish believing hearts to truth, certainly there is no 
nobler office for a human life than that ; and the doc- 
trine wdiich I want to preach to you to-day is that 
the human life or human nature is so made as to ful- 
fil just that office. How can we better tell the story 
of you who first believe in God yourself and then are 
drawn out to make your fellow-men believe in Him, 
and in making them believe in Him find your own 
belief grow steadier and clearer — how shall we better 
depict this human life which never learns anything 
without hearing other human lives clamoring to 
share the blessings of its knowledge than by recurring 
to the story of Peter, to whom, " as he thought on the 
vision, the Spirit said, Behold three men seek thee." 

It is illustrated, this central and critical position 
in which a man may stand, by the way in which the 
artist stands between the whole world of beautiful 
ideas and the hard world of matter, in which these 
ideas at last find their expression through him. The 
artist dreams his dream, and as he thinks upon the 
vision, the Spirit says, Behold the marble seeks thee;" 
and instantly the chisel is in his hand and the work 



Visions and Tasks, 



of carving has begun. Ideas would hover like a great 
vague cloud over a world all hard and gross and 
meaningless, if it were not for man who brings the 
fire down and makes the whole of nature significant 
and vocal. If civilization has changed the face of 
nature, and out of rocks and trees built monuments 
and cities, the whole long history is but the record 
of the meeting within the transmitting intelligence 
of man of the abstract idea with the adaptable ma- 
terial. 

But to return from our illustration to our truth. 
There are some moments in life when this position 
of man, as standing between the visions which he has 
seen and his fellow-men on whom he is to bring them 
into power, is peculiarly manifest. There are perhaps 
some young men here to-day who stands just at one of 
those moments now. When any process of education 
has been finished, when the college doors have just dis- 
missed their graduate, when the professional student 
stands upon the brink of the troubled waters of his 
profession with the calm scholar-days behind him, 
when the young minister is just feeling the hands of 
ordination on his bowed head, in all these days how 
real this sense of the two worlds between which he 
stands is to any truly thoughtful man. Between the 
silence and the stir, between the calm accumulation 
and the active employment of his truth, the young 
man stands with a strange consciousness which is 
never so vividly repeated at any other moment of 
his life. The two worlds, one on each side of him, re- 
ceive illumination from each other, and this illumi- 



Visions and Tasks. 



nation is sent back and forth through him. Truth 
never seemed so sacred as when he comes in sight of 
its true uses; and the world never seemed so well 
"worth living for as when he sees how much it 
needs his truth. Sad is the lot, sad is the nature of 
any man who can pass through such a moment and 
not be solemnized and exalted by it. Sad is the man 
who can graduate from college and go out into 
the world, and think of his education only as a 
drudgery from which he has at last escaped, or as 
an equipment with which he is to earn his daily 
bread. 

Sad is the lot and nature of any man who sees his 
youth fading back behind him, finds himself grow- 
ing out of the specially vision-seeing period of life, 
and counts his visions as they fade//mere pleasant 
recollections, or, it may be, things to laugh at and to 
be ashamed of. Sometimes you see a happy man, of 
whom, as he grows older, nothing of that kind is true. 
A man we see sometimes who, as he comes to mid- 
dle-life, finds his immediate enthusiastic sight of 
ideal things grown dull; that is the almost neces- 
sary condition of his ripening life. He does not 
spring as quickly as he once did to seize each newly 
oifered hope for man. A thousand disenchantments 
have made him serious and sober. He looks back, 
and the glow and sparkle which he once saw in 
life he sees no longer. He wonders at his recol- 
lection of himself, and asks how it is possible that 
life ever should have seemed to him as he remem- 
bers that it did seem. But the fact that it really did 



Visions and Tasks. 



once seem so to him is his most valued certainty. 
He would not part with that assurance for anything. 
All the hajd work that he does now is done in the 
strength and light of that remembered enthusiasm. 
To have been born into the world as he is now -J never 
to have had any years in which the sky seemed 
brighter and the fields greener, and man more noble, 
and the world more hopeful than they seem to-day, 
would make all life for him another and a drearier 
thing. Every day the dreams of his boyhood, which 
seem dead, are really the live inspirations of his life. 
To such a man there surely came, some day or other 
in the past, a Peter-hour, a time at which the visions 
of his youth and the hard work of his manhood met 
and knew each other. From that time on the 
power of his vision passed into his work; and now, 
as, with his calm, dry face, seeming so unemotional, 
so unmoved, he goes about his labor, doing his duty 
and serving his generation, it is really the fire of his 
youth which no longer blazes, but still burns within 
him that makes the active power of that dry, prudent, 
conscientious, useful man. Peter plodding over the 
dusty hills to reach Cornelius, may seem to have lost 
the glory which was on his face while he sat and 
thought upon the vision, and caught glimpses of the 
essential nobleness of man — but the vision was at 
the soul of his journey all the time, and was what 
made his journey different from that of any peddler 
whom he met upon the road. 

One longs to speak to men whom the hard work 
and dry details of life are just claiming, as they are 



8 Visions and Tasks. 

leaving their youth behind and passing- into middle 
life. You may expect to grow less enthusiastic and 
excited. Do not be surprised at that. But in the meet- 
ing of the facts of life with those accumulated con- 
victions which must be the real heart of any true 
enthusiast, you ought to be growing more and more 
earnest the longer that you live. There are trees 
whose fruit does not ripen till their leaves have fallen ; 
but we are sure that the ripe fruit does not laugh 
at the fallen leaves whose strength it has drawn out 
into its own perfected shape and color. If you do 
not see the visions which you saw when you were a 
boy, that does not prove that the vision was not true. 
That boy's belief that man is essentially noble, and 
the world is full of hope, is as genuinely a part of your 
total life as this man's experience that men will cheat, 
and that the world's great wheels move very slowly. 
The emotions grow less eager and excited, but the 
convictions ought to be growing always stronger — 
as the kernel ripens in the withering shell. Believe 
in man with all your childhood's confidence, while 
you work for man with all a man's prudence and cir- 
cumspection. Such union of energy and wisdom 
makes the completest character, and the most pow- 
erful life. 

I have been wandering a little from my subject. 
The power of man to stand between abstract truth 
upon the one side and the concrete facts of life upon 
the other, comes from the co-existence in his human 
nature of two different powers, without the possession 
of both of which no man possesses a complete hu- 



Visions a?zd Tasks. 



manity. One of these powers is the power of knowing-, 
and the other is the power of loving. I ask you to 
give to both of the words their fullest meaning, and 
then how rich the nature grows which has them 
both — this human nature, which is not truly human 
if either of them be left out. The power of know- 
ing, however the knowledge may be sought or won, 
whether by patient study or quick-leaping intuition, 
including imagination and all the poetic power, faith, 
trust in authority, the faculty of getting wisdom by 
experience, everything by which the human nature 
comes into direct relationship to truth, and tries to 
learn, and in any degree, succeeds in knowing — that is 
one necessary element of manhood. And the other is 
Love,the power of sympathetic intercourse with things 
and people, the power to be touched by the personal 
nature with which we have to do — love therefore, 
including hate, for hate is only the reverse utterance 
of love, the negative expression of the soul's affection ; 
to hate anything is vehemently to love its opposite. 
Love thus, as the whole element of personal affection 
and relationship of every sort, this too is necessary, in 
order that a man may really be a man. These two 
together must be in all men. Not merely in the 
greatest men. It is not a question of greatness, but 
of genuineness and completeness. Just as the same 
chemical elements must be in a raindrop that are in 
Niagara, and, if they are, then the raindrop is as truly 
water as the cataract ; so the power of learning truth 
and the power of loving man must be in you or me, 
as well as in Shakspeare or Socrates ; and if they are, 



io Visions and Tasks. 

then we are as genuinely and completely men as 
Socrates and Shakspeare. 

From this it will immediately follow, that the more 
perfectly these two constituents of human nature 
meet, the more absolutely they are proportioned to 
each other, and the more completely they are blend- 
ed, so much the more ready will the human nature be 
for the fulfilment of every function of humanity. 
And if, as we have seen, one of the loftiest functions 
of humanity is to stand between the absolute truth 
and the world's needs, and to transmit the one in 
such way that it can really reach and help the 
other, then it will also follow that the more perfectly 
the knowing faculty and the loving faculty meet in 
any man, the more that man's life will become a 
transmitter and interpreter of truth to other men. 

That sounds like a dry inference ; but it is one 
of which our own dearest experiences have borne to 
all of us most precious testimony.) If you look back 
to the men who have taught you most, and in the 
fuller light where you now stand, study their 
character, you will surely find that the real secret of 
their power lay here, in the harmonious blending of 
the knowing and the loving powers in their nature ; 
in the opening of their nature on both sides, so that 
truth entered in freely here and you entered in freely 
there, and you and truth met, as it were, familiarly 
in the hospitality of their great characters. The 
man who has only the knowing power active, lets 
truth in, but it finds no man to feed. The man who 
has only the loving power active, lets man in, but he 



Visions and Tasks. n 

finds no truth to feed on. The real teacher welcomes 
both. 

You know this in all who are really teachers. It 
is most clear of all in that highest of all the teacher- 
ships which the world has to show, which comes with 
its blessing to the beginning of every human life 
which is not by special misfortune poorer than it 
ought to be. Ask where a mother's power lies, and 
surely the answer must be that no being like the true 
mother stands between visions of the highest truths 
on one side, and a human soul on the other, and offers 
a nature in which the knowing power and the lov- 
ing power are kneaded and moulded together into a 
perfect oneness, into a sacred and pure transparency 
for the transmission of the first facts of the uni- 
verse, and God and Life to the intelligence of 
her child, who lives in her knowledge by her love. 
The purest mingling of all elements into one char- 
acter and nature which we can ever see, is in the 
Christian mother, in whom the knowledge of all 
that she knows and the love w T hich she feels for 
her child, make not two natures, as they often do in 
men, in fathers, but perfectly and absolutely one. 
She values knowledge not for its own sake, but for 
her child. She loves him not with the mere animal 
fondness with which the brute mother loves her 
child, but as the utterance and revelation of every 
truth to her. Thus her love and her intelligence 
are blended perfectly ; and the result is that which 
we know, the wonderful power of the mother's life 
to bring the deepest, highest, farthest truths, and 



12 Visions and Tasks. 

win for them their first entrance into the nature of 
her child. 

The New Testament tells us of Jesus that He was 
full of Grace and Truth. Grace and Truth ! These are 
exactly the two elements of which we have been 
speaking, and it must have been in the perfect meet- 
ing of those two elements in him that His mediator- 
ship, His power to transmute the everlasting truths of 
God into the immediate help of needy men consisted. 
He was no rapt self-centered student of the abstract 
truth; nor was he the merely ready sentimental 
pitier of the woes of men. But in His whole nature 
there was finely wrought and combined the union 
of the abstract and eternal with the special and the 
personal, which made it possible for him, without an 
effort, to come down from the mountain where he had 
been glorified with the light of God, and take up in- 
stantly the cure of the poor lunatic in the valley; or 
to descend from the hill where he had been praying, 
to save his disciples half-shipwrecked on the lake ; 
or to turn his back on the comforting angels of Geth- 
semane, that he might give himself into the hands 
of the soldiers who were to lead him to the cross. 
"While he thought upon the vision, the Spirit said 
unto him, Behold three men seek thee." Can any 
words more typically tell the life of Christ than 
those ! 

It is a truth which we have all learned from some 
experience through which we have been led, that any 
great experience, seriously and greatly met and 
passed through, makes the man who has passed 



Visions and Tasks, 13 

through it always afterwards a purer medium 
through which the highest truth may shine on other 
men. Have you not seen it ? Here is some man 
whom you have known long. You have seemed to 
have reached the end of all that it is possible for you 
to get from him, all that it is possible for him to do 
for you. Nothing has come through him from behind 
to you. You have seen him. You have seen a sort 
of glint or glimmer of reflection of God's light 
upon the surface of His life, as the sun might be re- 
flected on a plate of steel. But nothing of God or 
God's truth has come through him to you as the sun 
shines through a lens of glass, pouring its increased 
intensity upon the wood it sets in flame. 

But some day you meet that man, and he is altered. 
Tenderer, warmer, richer, he seems to be full of 
truths and revelations which he easily pours out to 
you. Now you not merely see him ; you see through 
him to things behind. As you talk with him, as you 
look into his face, you see with new surprising clear- 
ness what God is, what man is, what a great thing it 
is to live, what a great thing it is to die, how mysteri- 
ous and pathetic are sorrow and happiness, and fear 
and hope. You cannot begin to tell the change by 
merely thinking that the man has learned some new 
facts and is telling them to you, as a book might 
tell them from its printed page. The very substance 
of the man is altered, so that he stands between the 
eternal truths and you no longer as a screen, which 
shuts them from your sight, but as an atmosphere 
through which they come to you all radiant. You 



14 Visions and Tasks. 

ask what has come to him, and you hear (if you 
are near enough for him to tell you his most sacred 
history), of some profound experience. He has 
passed through an overwhelming sorrow. He has 
stood upon the brink of some tremendous danger. 
He has spent a day and a night in the deep of some 
bewildering doubt. He has been overmastered by 
some sudden joy. It may have been one of these or 
another. The result has been in such a change of 
the very substance of the nature, that, whereas before 
it was all thick and muddy, so that whatever light 
fell upon it was either cast aside or else absorbed into 
it and lost, now it makes truth first visible, and 
then clear and convincing to the fellow-men who see 
truth through it. 

And when you try to analyze this change, do you 
not find that it consisls in an impregnation of the 
nature which has had this new experience with two 
forces — one a love for truth, the other a love for 
man ? and it is in the perfect combination of these 
two in any life that the clarifying of that life into a 
power of transmission and irradiation truly lies. 
What man goes worthily through sorrow and does 
not come out hating shams and pretences, hunger- 
ing for truth; and also full of sympathy for his fel- 
low-man whose capacity for suffering has been re- 
vealed to him by his own. It is the perfect blend- 
ing of those two constituents in the new nature 
of your tried and patient friend which have given 
him this wondrous power of showing God and truth 
to you. 



Visions and Tasks. 15 

What man goes bravely and faithfully through 
doubt and does not bring out a soul to which truth 
seems to be infinitely precious, and the human soul 
the most mysterious, sacred thing in all the world. 
Out of the union of those two persuasions has come 
the prophetship of this life which now you cannot 
look at without seeing the infinite behind it made 
clear by it. 

Surely, if we can believe this, then the way in 
which God lets his children encounter great, and 
sometimes terrible, experiences is not entirely inex- 
plicable. Surely if these souls which now are deep 
in sorrow, or are being cast up and down and back and 
forth in doubt, are being thus annealed and purified 
that they may come to be revealers, mediators be- 
tween God and their fellow-men, then into our 
wonder at the existence of doubt and sorrow in God's 
world there comes a little ray of light. Who would 
not bear anything that could refine his life into fitness 
for such a privilege as that ? 

I had meant to speak of several of the special vis- 
ions wdiich, through the soul that is prepared for 
such an office, become transformed into influence and 
blessing to mankind. I can only indicate them in 
the slightest way. Suppose that God has let you see 
His goodness. A strong, unalterable persuasion that 
God is merciful and kind has been poured onto your 
life, into your mind. That fact itself, once known, 
absorbs your contemplation. If you and God were 
all the universe, the knowledge of His goodness 
would be everything to you. You would sit lonely 



1 6 Visions and Tasks, 

in" the empty world and fill your soul with gazing on 
the brightness of that truth. So you do sit to-day, 
as if you and God were indeed alone, and no one in 
the universe except you two. And then, as you sit 
so, there comes some sort of appeal from fellow-men. 
The three men are down at the door while you are 
dreaming on the housetop. Your child comes to 
you with some childish joy and wants its explanation ; 
some puzzled neighbor cries across to you, from his 
life to yours, and wants to know if you have any 
clue to all this snarl of living. Somehow the cry 
awakens you, and you go down and put your truth 
into your brother's hands. At first it seems almost 
a profanation. The truth is so sacred and seems so 
thoroughly your own. But as you give it to your 
brother, new lights come out in it. For God to be 
good means something more when the goodness 
turns to new forms of blessing in the new need of 
this new life. O you who think you know that God 
is merciful because of the mercy which He has 
shewed to you, be sure there is a richness in your 
truth which you have not reached yet, which you 
will never reach until you let Him make your life the 
interpreter of His goodness to some other soul ! 

Or again perhaps the truth which you have learned, 
the vision which you have seen, is the sinfulness of 
sin — what a terrible thing it is for any child of God 
to disobey his Father. Overwhelmed with that 
knowledge, you sit and brood upon your sad estate. 
I think that all religious history bears witness that 
that conviction, if it remains purely a personal truth 



Visions and Tasks. 17 

of our own life, certainly grows tyrannical and mor- 
bid and brings despair. As soon as it becomes a 
stimulus, inspiring us to go and help our brethren es- 
cape out of their sin, it becomes salutary and blessed. 
If I knew any soul to-day, haggard and weary with 
its consciousness of sin and danger, I think that 
what I would try to do to help it would be this — make 
it see in its own sinfulness the revelation of the sin- 
fulness of all the world; then let it forget its own sin- 
fulness and keep only the impulse that must come 
out of its sight of how horrible the world's sin is; 
then let it go, full of that impulse, and try to save the 
world. So it must find its own salvation. 

So of the truth of immortality. Not as a per- 
sonal privilege of mine, but as a token of the great- 
ness and worth of the human soul, making every 
service which I can render to it more imperious and 
delightful — so do I come to understand the fact that 
man never dies with the fullest faith. 

So of such a truth as the Trinity. Not as a puz- 
zle or a satisfaction of the intellect, but as an ex- 
pression of the manifold helpfulness with which the 
divine nature offers itself to the human, so it will 
be to me the richest and the holiest creed. 

There are no limits to our doctrine. Every truth 
which it is possible for man to know it is good for 
him to know with reference to his brother men. 
Only in that way is the truth which he knows kept 
at its loftiest and purest. This is the daily meaning 
which I want to find in the picture of Peter sitting 



Visions and Tasks. 



before his vision, on the house-top and the three men 
knocking in the street below. 

There is a danger, which we all recognize, of self- 
ishness in our religion. It comes in various forms. 
It makes one man say: "lam content, for I have 
seen the Lord." To that man the great host of his 
fellow-men who need his Lord as much as he, are 
nothing. He will leave them unheard in the street 
and sit within, wrapped in the complacency of his 
assured salvation. Another man says, " What busi- 
ness is it of any one except myself if I close my eyes 
and do not see the Lord ? Does it hurt any one but 
me ? Who has a right to interfere or urge me ?" To 
both of these men is there not a message in the story 
of Peter which we have been studying this morning? 
To the first man it says: The seeing of your own 
vision is but half, and half without the other half 
grows weak and perishes. Your religion, kept sole- 
ly for yourself, will certainly decay. Up, up, and go 
abroad and find the men who need your Christ, to 
whom you can bring Him, in giving Him to whom 
alone you can make your own faith in Him complete 
and strong. 

To the other man it says, Indeed it is the business 
of other men than you, it is the whole world's busi- 
ness whether or not you are a Christian ! Indeed it 
does rob other souls than yours, if you will not live 
spiritually and see the truth which God is showing 
to your soul. If there are men whom, being your- 
self a Christian, you might bring to Christ, then you 
rob not only yourself but them, if you refuse to come 



Visions and Tasks. 19 

to Christ. The window which makes itself dark, 
darkens not merely itself, but also all the room into 
which the light might have shone through it. 

I dare to hope that some generous nature may feel 
this appeal. Be spiritual, be religious, come to Christ. 
Cast off your sins, not for yourself, but for some soul 
which possibly may learn from you, what it could 
not learn in any other way, how good and strong 
and forgiving is the sinner's God. 

It is a terrible thing to have seen the vision, and 
to be so wrapped np in its contemplation as not to 
hear the knock of needy hands upon our doors. 

It is a terrible thing to hear the knock and have 
no vision to declare to the poor knocker. 

But there is no greater happiness in all the world 
than for a man to love Christ for the mercy Christ 
has shown his soul, and then to open his whole 
heart outward and help to save his brethren's souls 
with the same salvation in which he rejoices for 
himself. May none of us go through life so poor as 
never to have known that happiness. 



SERMON II. 

%\t potter's Wmtttrc. 

"Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us?" — Luke ii. 48. 

THE mother of Jesus is the speaker, and it is of 
Jesus that she asks her question. On the way 
home from the temple at Jerusalem, where they had 
gone to worship, you remember, they missed the child 
Jesus from their company. On going back they found 
him in the temple, " sitting in the midst of the doc- 
tors, both hearing them and asking them questions." 
Then it was that His mother said unto him, ; ' Son, 
why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold thy fa- 
ther and I have sought thee sorrowing. And he 
said unto them, How is it that ye sought me ? wist 
ye not that I must be about my father's business ?" 

"Why hast thou dealt thus with us?" It is a puzzled 
question. The boy, who had been an obedient child in 
her household, whom she had cared for in her own 
way and found always docile to her guidance, had 
suddenly past beyond her and done a thing which 
she could not understand. It seemed as if she had 
lost him. Her tone is full of love, but there is some- 
thing almost like jealousy about it. lie has taken 
20 



The Mother s Wonder, 21 

himself into his own keeping, and this one act seems 
to foretell the time when he will take his whole life 
into his own hands, and leave her outside altogether. 
The time has past when she could hold him as a babe 
upon her bosom as she carried him down into Egypt. 
The time is prophesied already when he should go in 
his solitude up to the cross, and only leave his 
mother weeping at the foot. She is bidden to stand 
by and see her Son do his work and live his life, 
which thus far has been all of her shaping:, in ways 
she cannot understand. No wonder that it is a clear, 
critical moment in her life. No wonder that her 
question still rings with the pain that she put into it. 
No wonder that when she went home, although he 
was still "subject unto her," her life with her son 
was all changed, and she " kept all these sayings 
in her heart." 

I think that this question of the mother of Jesus 
reveals an experience of the human heart which is 
very common, which is most common in the best 
hearts and those who feel their responsibility the most. 
It is an experience which well deserves our study, and 
I ask you this morning to think about it with me in 
some of its examples. The Virgin Mary is the per- 
petual type of people who, intrusted with any great 
and sacred interest, identify their own lives with 
that interest and care for it conscientiously; but who, 
by-and-by,when the interest begins to manifest its own 
vitality and to shape its own methods, are filled with 
perplexity. They cannot keep the causes for which 
they labor under their own care. As his mother 



22 The Mothers Wonder. 

asked of Jesus, so they are always asking of the objects 
for which they live, " Why hast thou thus dealt with 
us?" Such people are people who have realized 
responsibility more than they have realized God. 
Just as Mary felt at the moment when she asked this 
question, that Jesus was her son more than that h e 
was God's _Som so there is a constant tendency among 
the most earnest and conscientious people, to feel that 
the causes for which they live and work are their 
causes, more than that they are God's causes, and so 
to experience something which is almost like jealousy, 
when they see those causes pass beyond their power 
and fulfil themselves in larger ways than theirs. 
For such people, often the most devoted and faithful 
souls among us, it seems to me that there must be 
some help and light in this story of Jesus and his 
mother. 

The first and simplest case of the experience which 
I want to speak of, is that which comes nearest to 
the circumstances of our story. It comes in every 
childhood. It comes whenever a boy grows up to the 
time at which he passes beyond the merely parental 
government which belonged to his earliest years. 
It comes with all assertion of individual character 
and purpose in a boy's life. A boy has had his career 
all identified with his home where he was cradled. 
What he was and did, he was and did as a member 
of that household. But by-and-by there comes some 
sudden outbreak of a personal energy. He shows 
some disposition, and attempts some task distinctive- 
ly his own. It is a puzzling moment alike for the 



The Mother 's Wonder. 23 

child and for the father. The child is perplexed with 
pleasure which is almost pain to find himself for 
the first time doing an act which is genuinely his 
own. The father is filled with a pain which yet 
has pride and pleasure in it to see his boy doing 
something original, something which he never bade 
him do, something which perhaps he could not do 
himself. The real understanding of that moment, 
both to child and father, depends upon one thing — 
upon whether they can see in it the larger truth that 
this child is not merely the son of his father, but 
also is the son of God. If they both understand 
that, then the child, as he undertakes his personal 
life, passes not into a looser, but into a stronger, 
responsibility. And the father is satisfied to see his 
first authority over his son grow less, because he 
cannot be jealous of God. It is a noble progress and 
expansion of life, when the first independent venture 
of a young man on a career of his own, is not the 
wilful claim of the prodigal: "Give me the portion 
of goods that falleth to me," — but the reverent appeal 
of Jesus : " Wist ye not that I must be about my 
Father's business ?" 

Let this serve for an illustration. It is the scene 
which, recurring in every household, as a boy claims 
his own life, is constantly repeating the experience 
of the household of Nazareth. And now all respon- 
sible life, all life entrusted with the care of any of 
God's causes, has this same sort of correspondence 
with the life of the mother of Jesus. There can be 
no higher specimen of responsibility than she ex- 



24 The Mothers Wonder, 

hibits. She is entrusted with the care of Him who is 
to be the Saviour of the world. And that responsi- 
bility she accepts entirely. She is willing to give up 
everything else in life, to be absorbed and worn out 
in the task of supreme privilege which God has 
given her. There comes no trouble or lack in the 
degree of her readiness for labor or for pain. But 
the quality of her self-sacrifice shows its defect else- 
where. She is not able to see where the limits of her 
work must be. She is not able to stop short in her 
devout responsibility, when the task passes beyond 
her power, and her son begins to deal directly with 
his Father. 

Compare with her, in the first place, that person 
with whom we are familiar in all the history of 
Christianity, whom we see about us constantly — the 
champion of the Faith, the man who counts it his 
work in life to maintain and protect the purity of the 
belief in Christ. It is a noble task for a man to ac- 
cept. It is filled with anxiety. The faith for which 
the man cares is beset with many dangers. It costs 
him sleepless nights and weary days. He incurs 
dislike; he excites hostility by his eager zeal. To 
all this he is fully equal. The danger of many a 
stout champion of truth comes quite at the other end. 
There comes a time when God, as it were, takes back 
into His own keeping that faith over which He has 
bidden His disciples to stand guard. The truth begins 
to show a vitality upon which the believer has not 
counted. It puts itself into new forms. It develops 
new associations. No wonder that he is troubled. No 



Thz Mothers Wonder. 25 

wonder that, unless he is a large and thoughtful man, 
thoroughly reverent of truth as well as thoroughly 
devoted to the truths which he has held, he grudges 
truth in some way the larger freedom which it is 
claiming for itself, and almost opposes its develop- 
ment. 

Take an example. A good man has for years count- 
ed himself a champion of the often denied and insult- 
ed justice of God. He has been ready to maintain 
it everywhere. Against all weak representations of 
God as a being all indulgence, he has asserted that 
God must punish wickedness. That truth he has 
supported, as he has conceived it, in its simplest, 
crudest form — physical, unending punishment. Sup- 
pose the day comes when that faith claims for itself 
a free and more spiritual meaning; when men's souls 
become aware that in the world to come, as in this 
world, the punishment of sin must be bound up in 
sin itself ; when not the agonies of hell, but the de- 
gradation of the moral nature, stands out as the 
dreadful thing. No wonder that at first, the surprised 
believer is almost dismayed. His faith, over which 
he has stood guard so faithfully, seems to be slipping 
away from him. His faith seems to be playing him 
false. He is bewuldered, as Mary was when Jesus for 
the first time began to show his personal will and 
ways. But by-and-by the time came when she rejoiced 
in it, no doubt. " Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it," 
she ordered the servants at the marriage in Cana. 
By that time she had learned to trust her Son far out 
of her own sight, to look to his own self-develop- 



26 The Mother s Wonder. 

ment with perfect confidence. And so the believer, 
and the champion of belief, comes in the course of time 
to rejoice when his belief outgrows him; when what 
he has to stand guard over is seen to be, not the spe- 
cial form in which a dogma has been conceived, but 
the spirit to which knowledge can come, and to 
which it must come always more spiritually and 
richly; not the truth, but truthfulness. 

It does seem to me that this is what many a be- 
liever needs to learn to-day. His faith seems to be 
slipping away from him. Truths will not remain 
the definite and docile things they used to be. His 
doctrine opens into some deeper form. He turns to 
the doctrine he has held and says to it, '' Why have 
you dealt thus with me ?" " Why will you leave me ?" 
And the answer is, "I must be about my Father's 
business." Truth is God's child. Truth must be what 
God wills, not what the believer wills. It is a bless- 
ed day for the believer when he learns this, and 
thenceforth only waits to see what new forms God 
will give his faith from year to year, and then is ready 
to follow it into whatever new regions God will 
send it forth to seek. 

And this same truth applies to the care for the 
world's reformation and improvement, which differ- 
ent kinds of good men have. There are some men 
undertaking to reform the world who want to keep 
the whole plan in their own hands and never have 
its working outgo their wisdom. There are other 
reformers who believe themselves to be working in 
a great system which is far too large for them to 



The Mothers Wonder. 27 

comprehend, to which they can only give a helping 
touch at one point where it conies near their lives. 
The first kind of reformer believes that he under- 
stands it all, knows just how evil is to be eradicated, 
just how good is to be aroused and the world saved. 
The other reformer does not profess to know any- 
thing except that God is over all and that under 
God he has the privilege of helping this cause or 
that cause of righteousness in some special time of 
need, and at some special point which he can 
touch. The first is the reformer with a theory. 
The second is a reformer with a devotion. 

And it is evident what will be the different effect 
on these two men, if, as so often happens, the pro- 
gress of humanity seems to declare a will of its own, 
does not advance as we expected it to advance, lags 
where we look for it to hasten, or leaps to some great 
attainment where we expected it to proceed by slow 
degrees. The theoretical reformer, who thinks him- 
self a master of human progress, and has imagined 
that he understood it all, is entirely lost as he sees the 
reform which he has thought could only come to pass 
in one way, attaining its accomplishment in another, 
and going on its way far off in some new direction, 
leaving him behind. The devout reformer, who has 
considered himself the servant of human good, is 
glad enough to see that human good is far larger 
than he can understand, and is content if he can lend 
his little skill to some corner of its many wants, and 
be carried on with it, working for it, to unknown 
results. 



28 The Mother s Wonder. 

There are always people who are uneasy if hard 
times improve by other ways than they suggested. 
There are men enough in our land to-day who cannot 
be totally glad that slavery is abolished, because its 
abolition did not come about by their plan. There- 
are men in the Church who begrudge the work she 
does, if it is not done by their own school of church- 
men. What is the trouble with all these people ? Is 
it not simple enough ? They have the care of some 
one of God's children, some one of the causes which 
are born of Him, and which He loves, but they treat 
it as if it were not God's child, but only theirs. They 
are afraid if they see it growing strong in ways 
which they do not understand. When it dawns upon 
such a man that behind all the care which he has 
for any of the great interests of righteousness and 
the use which God is making of him in its behalf, 
God himself is holding that interest in the hollow of 
His hand, and with His infinite wisdom is preparing 
for it ways of success which Plis servant cannot 
begin to know, how calm and confident the servant's 
care for that good work must grow ; how ready he must 
be to see the methods of the reform which he desires 
change utterly before his eyes, to see it taken utterly 
out of his hands and yet work on for it with all his 
might and soul. Here is the salvation of honest 
partisanship. You believe that only your political 
party can save the country. But if you believe that 
the salvation of the country is a care of God, you will 
stand ever ready to help whatever new party God 
may seem to entrust with one period of that ever un- 



The Mother s Wonder. 29 

finished work. You and I believe that our Church 
has a great work to do for Christ's Gospel in our 
country, but if we believe that Christ's gospel is 
something which is very near to the heart of God, 
we cannot possibly limit our sympathy to what our 
Church is doing. Even if our Church fails of its duty, 
we cannot possibly feel as if the gospel had failed. 
We shall have to rejoice, even while we work on with 
her, that God has other ways to do the work in which 
she does her part so feebly. 

These cases are no doubt too general ; they do 
not touch us very closely. Let us try to come 
nearer home. I think that the same principle ap- 
plies to every work which any one of us tries to do 
for any of his brethren. I know that in this con- 
gregation there must be many who are anxious for 
the life of some one whom they love. A certain re- 
sponsibility lies upon you for some brother's life. 
Somebody seems to have been given to you to care 
for. You did not seek the care. But here is some 
one who, because there is no one else to care for him 
and see that he goes right, has grown to be your care. 
That responsibility is no light one, you well know. 
It presses on you. You are anxious under it. Can 
our story help you? Surely it can. You say, "How? 
Is there not an un likeness at the very outset of the 
story ? Was not this one over whom the Virgin Mary 
watched, the Son of God ? " But tell me: is not the 
man whom you are anxious for, the brother who is 
in the midst of his temptation, the friend who is 
out of work and growing idle, the beggar whom you 



The Mother s Wonder. 



are trying to reform out of his drunkenness, is not 
each of these too a son of God ? And is it not true, 
and must it not enter into the very centre of your 
care for them, that they are under God's care just as 
truly as they are under your care; and that, while 
God uses you for their development, it is perfectly 
possible, it is every way to be expected, that He will 
develop them by means and in directions of which 
you never would have dreamed ? 

I think that it is hopeless for any man to under- 
take to render high help to another man's life who 
is not constantly aware of this. Mary learned two 
things about her Son that day in the temple, things 
which she had known before, but which became per- 
fectly and permanently clear to her there. One was, 
that his life was mysteriously larger than her own. 
The other was, that God was over and behind her, 
caring for that life for which she had been caring. 
The largeness and mystery of her Son's life and the 
fatherhood of God to him, those two things she 
learned there, and thenceforth they were part of her 
life always. She never can have forgotten them 
again. They must have made all the future service 
that she rendered to him at once more faithful and 
more calm and more sacred. And my dear friend, 
you too must learn these truths about the life of any 
man whom you are trying to help, any man who 
seems to be committed to you by God, or you cannot 
really help him as he needs. You must know the 
mystery of his life and his sonship to God. 

Ah, how God sometimes teaches us those things 



The Mothers Wonder. 31 

about some one whom we are trying to guide and 
aid. We have undertaken our task very flippantly 
and narrowly. " Well, this is my man," we say, " I 
do not see who else can help him, and so I will. I 
will patronize him. I understand him ; I see what 
is to be made out of him; I will make him this, and 
this," — laying some fine plan down in our mind. 
"This is what he shall be," and so you take your 
scholar into your school ; your companion into your 
company; what you call your friend into what you 
call your friendship. The time must come, if you 
are ever really going to be of deepest use to that 
man, when, out of something which he says or does, 
these two truths come to you about him, that he 
is larger in his nature, more mysterious than you 
can grasp, and that he is the son of God, led by 
his Father, over and above your care. 

We talk about men's neglect of one another's lives, 
and certainly there is enough of it. They go their 
way saying of each other, in some utterance of their 
indifference, "Am I my brother's keeper?" We 
recognize how terrible it is because we see that, as 
of old, he who scornfully disowned his brother's care, 
really was his brother's murderer, so always he 
who thinks he has no duty of helping other men, 
certainly hinders them and does them harm. But 
beside all the pain at seeing how men disown "the 
care of their fellows, there is another pain which is 
often yet more painful as we see how men who do 
attempt to help their brethren, help them all wrong, 
with, such ignorant and clumsy hands that they do 



32 The Mother s Wonder. 

them more harm than good. Meddlesomeness, arro- 
gance, foolish, indulgence, wanton severity, wooden 
insistence upon a way of goodness which God never 
meant for the man whom you are trying to make 
good, opposition to good impulses because they hap- 
pen to be in other lines than yours, fussiness, suspic- 
ion, jealousy, all of these evils come in, and others 
with them, to make sometimes worse than worthless 
the most sincere desire of some good man to help 
and guide his neighbor. Blind leading the blind 
everywhere I What, it seems to me, all these 
good people need, is this: the larger view of the life 
that they are anxious for. There is a mystery about 
this man which I cannot fathom. And this man is 
a child of God. You say, " I might feel that about, 
some inspired child whom I was privileged to teach. 
How can I feel it about this poor sot, whom I am 
trying to keep out of the grog-shop; or this poor 
trifier and lounger whom I want to bring to church ; 
or this poor creature with the shattered nerves whom 
I must watch lest he should throw himself into the 
fire ? Can I count his life mysterious, count him a 
child of God ? " Unless you can, you cannot help him 
with any truly deep help. You may keep him un- 
scorched and presentable, but the shattered, broken, 
wasted life at the centre, where its real exhaustion 
lies, will get no reinforcement from the man who has 
no reverence for it and no sense of God's love for it. 
The moment that Moses forgot that the people he 
was leading were God's people, and smote the rock, 
crying, "Hear, Israel, must 1 bring you water 



The Mother s Wonder. ^ 

from this rock ? " that moment his highest help to 
them was gone. He could give them water still, but 
the water which he gave as if it were his gift, and 
not God's, was an insult both to them and to God; 
and from that day his death began. 

And if we ask what will be the characteristics of 
the ministry of any man. who, while he renders 
help to other men, feels these truths deeply about the 
men to whom he ministers, the answer will be clear. 
It will have the qualities which we can easily imag- 
ine to have been in the treatment of the child Jesus 
by His mother after her experience in the Temple. 
It will consist in general inspiration more than in 
special direction; and it will be more occupied in 
removing obstacles to growth than in dictating the 
forms and directions in which growth shall grow. 
The best advisers, helpers, friends, always are those 
not who tell us how to act in special cases, but who 
give us, out of themselves, the ardent spirit and de- 
sire to act right, and leave us then, even through 
many blunders, to find what our own form of right 
action is. And always the best thing you can do for 
any brother, I am more and more convinced, is to 
try to keep him from being a bad man, and so give 
God a chance to make him a good man in whatever 
way He may choose. This takes away the superior 
and patronizing tone which is the blight of many a 
mans most sincere desire to be useful. This leaves 
the humblest free to help the highest. The mouse 
may gnaw the lion's net, but he does not ask the 

freed lion to crawl into the wall with him and live a 
3 



34 The Mother s Wonder. 

mouse's life. So you may help a strong man to 
shake off his vice, but when he is at liberty, leave 
him to God to learn what life God made him for, and 
be thankful if it is something a great deal larger and 
higher than your own. 

There are small men to whom all this would be 
depressing. They do not want to do anything for 
other men unless they can take the whole work into 
their own hands and make it wholly theirs. For a 
larger man it is a great deal nobler and more enno- 
bling to work with God and on a material of which 
God has shown to him the mystery. A weak He- 
brew mother, with a poor stupid boy who never left 
the company with any true impulsive life to seek 
the God whom he belonged to, may well have 
pitied Mary, and thought her unhappy in her wilful 
child. But " Mary kept all these things and pon- 
dered them in her heart." She learned that it was 
nobler to bring her boy to God and see him take God 
for his Father, than it was to keep him to herself. 
And so you and I come to understand that the 
type of the truest relationship between man and 
man is not the Komish confessional, the spiritual di- 
rectorship where one man gives his life into another's 
hands, but is the frank friendship of generous men, 
wherein each helps the other, but is always glad to 
know that he is really only helping God to help him ; 
and so each always rejoices to see the other, under 
God, outgo himself. 

But we must not stop here. There is a vet deeper 
and closer care laid upon a man than his care for his 



The Mothers Wonder. 35 

brother, and that is the care of himself, of his own 
soul. And there too the truth applies which we 
have won out of our storj of Jesus and his mother. 
There too it is true that a man cannot execute his 
responsibility aright unless in that for which he is 
responsible he sees something- mysterious, and a 
child of God. 

A man's care for himself! How strange it is! 
How a man seems to separate his life ; to stand off, as 
it were, and gaze at his own life with criticism and 
anxiety. It is the commonest of all experiences 
with all thoughtful people. " Know thyself," says 
the old proverb; as if the knower and the known 
were genuinely two, distinct from one another. 
"Keep thy heart with diligence," says Scripture, as 
if the heart and the heart-keeper were separate. 
The will and wisdom stand guard over the conscience 
and the character. 

A man who is really thoughtful, who has risen to 
the capacity of such self-care, praises himself, and 
blames himself, with a more even-handed justice be- 
cause with a more intimate and conscientious knowl- 
edge, than that with which he judges of the lives of 
other men. He is to himself like something outside 
of himself, with whose conditions nevertheless all his 
own fortunes are inextricably bound up. Therefore 
he lays out plans for his own treatment. He says: 
"I will make myself this or that." He says, " I will 
bring myself to my best in this or that way." And 
then, as he tries to carry out his plans, he becomes 
aware that on this self of his which he considered so 



36 The Mother s Wonder. 

entirely his own, in his own power, some other force 
besides his own is working. He finds himself 
the subject of some other will and wisdom, some 
other education than his own. His plans for his own 
life are overruled and interfered with. He meant to 
educate his self by self-indulgence; this other force, 
below his own, sweeps his self off into distress and 
deprivation. He meant to live in self-complacency; 
the deeper force plunges him into mortification and 
shame. It is as if the wind thought that it was ruling 
the waves wmich it tossed to and fro, but gradually 
became aware of the tide which underneath was 
heaving the great ocean on whose surface only the 
wind spent its force. 

Is this a true picture of human life as the thought- 
ful man comes to know it ? I think it is. Who is 
there of us that is not aware that his soul has had 
two educations ? Sometimes the two have been in 
opposition; sometimes they have overlapped; some- 
times they have wholly coincided; but always the 
two have been two. Our own government of our- 
selves is most evident, is the one which we are most 
aware of, so that sometimes for a few moments w T e 
forget that there is any other; but very soon our plans 
for ourselves are so turned and altered and hindered 
that we cannot ignore the other greater, deeper force. 
We meant to do that, and look ! we have been led on 
to this. We meant to be this, and lo ! we are that. We 
never meant to believe this, and lo, we hold it with 
all our hearts. What does it mean ? It is the ever- 
lasting discovery, the discovery which each thought- 



The Mothers Wonder. ^y 

ful man makes for himself with almost as much sur- 
prise as if no other man had ever made it for himself 
before, that this soul, for which he is responsible, is 
not his soul only, but is God's soul too. The revela- 
tion which came of old to the Virgin Mother about 
her child — Not your child only, but God's child too; 
yours, genuinely, really yours, but behind yours, and 
over yours, God's. 

That is the great revelation about life. When it 
comes, everything about one's self-culture is altered. 
Every anticipation and thought of living changes its 
color. It comes sometimes early, and sometimes late 
in life. Sometimes it is the flush and glow which fills 
childhood with dewy hope and beauty. Sometimes it 
is the peace which gathers about old age and makes 
it happy. Whenever it comes it makes life new. See 
what the changes are which it must bring. First it 
makes anything like a bewildering surprise impossi- 
ble. When I have once taken it into my account 
that God has his plans for my soul's culture, that 
these plans of His outgo and supersede any plans for 
it which I can make, then any new turn that comes 
is explicable to me, and, though I may not have an- 
ticipated it all, I am not overwhelmed, nor disturbed, 
nor dismayed by it. I find a new conviction growing 
in my soul, another view of life, another kind of faith. 
It is not what I had intended. I had determined 
that as long as I lived I would believe something 
very different from this which I now feel rising and 
taking possession of me. It seems at first as if my 
soul had been disloyal to me, and had turned its back 



38 The Mother s Wonder. 

faithlessly upon my teaching. I appeal to it, and 
say: "Soul, why hast thou thus dealt with me?" 
And it answers back to me: "Wist you not, that I 
must be about my Father's business? Did you not 
know that I was God's soul as well as your soul ? 
This is something which He has taught me." 

That is the real meaning, my dear friends, of many 
a case in which men say, " I do not know how I came 
to believe this truth. I never sought it. I never 
meant to believe it. I always said I never would 
believe it. But the belief in it has come about in 
spite of myself." It was the over-fatherhood of God. 
It was God claiming His own soul. Let a man see 
this, and he welcomes the convictions that have come 
to his soul thus direct from God, even more cordially 
than those which he has sought out and won with 
deliberate toil. What he has believed in spite of him- 
self he believes even more strongly than what he has 
struggled to believe. He cannot be jealous of what 
God does for his soul. He is like a servant taking 
care of a child, with the father of the child standing 
behind and watching and making plans with a wis- 
dom which the servant rejoices to know is wiser than 
his. Oh, if there were no higher guidance than 
what we can give to our own lives ! Oh, if our souls 
never outstripped the plans which we make for them ! 
Oh, if we never came to more truth than we are 
brave enough and wise enough to seek ! 

There are two different conditions in which a man 
receives without bewildering surprise the changes 
which come to him in life. One is the condition of 



The Mother s Wonder. 39 

the man who believes in no government of life at all. 
The other is the condition of the man who thorough- 
ly believes that God is governing his life. To both 
of these men mystery is not merely conceivable; it is 
inevitable. To one it is the vague, dreary mystery 
of chance. To the other it is the rich, gracious mys- 
tery of loving care. To one it is the mystery of ac- 
cident, the most awful and demoralizing atmosphere 
for a man to live in. To the other it is the mystery 
of personal life, which is the noblest end of thought 
which man can reach on any side. Neither of these 
men can be surprised. One of them cries, " It is an- 
other accident ! " The other cries, " It is my father! " 
when any most unlooked-for thing occurs. Bet veen 
the two there stands the man with his own tight self- 
made plan of living which he looks to see fulfilled, 
denying both mysteries, refusing to believe in acci- 
dent and yet ignoring God. He is the man whose 
life is all battered and buffeted with surprises. He 
is like a man who sails the ocean and refuses to be- 
lieve in tides. No wonder that after a long and 
dreary voyage, he drags at last a broken and 
wrecked life up on a beach which he never dreamed 
of when he started. 

The other consequence of the great revelation of 
life, the revelation that the soul for which we care is 
God's soul, for which He is caring too, will be that the 
true man will have one great purpose in living, and 
only one. He will try to come to harmony with 
God, to perfect understanding of what God wants 
and is trying to do. Let me not be trying to make 



40 The Mother s Wonder. 

one thing out of this soul of mine while He is trying 
to make entirely another ! Once more return to the 
story which has given us our suggestions for to-day. 
As Mary went back with her son, realizing out of his 
own mouth, that he was not only her son, but God's; 
as she settled down with him to their Nazareth life 
again, must not one single strong question have 
been upon her heart, " What does God want this Son 
of His to be? 0, let me find that out, that 1 may 
work with Him." And as you go into the house 
where you are to train your soul, realizing, through 
some revelation that has come to it, that it is God's 
soul as well as yours, one strong and single question 
must be pressing on you too. '* What does God want 
this soul of mine to be ? 0, let me find that out 
that I may work with Him." And how can you find 
that out ? Only by finding Him out. Only by un- 
derstanding what He is, can you understand what He 
wants you to do. And understanding comes by love. 
And love to God comes by faith in Jesus Christ. 
See then, what is the divine progress of self-culture. 
You let Christ give you his blessings. Through 
gratitude to Him you come to the love of God. 
By loving God you understand God. By understand- 
ing God you come to see what He wants you to 
be, and so you are ready to work with Him for your 
own soul. From the first touch of Christ's hand in 
blessing, on to the eternal work of laboring with 
God for our own sanctification, that is the progress 
of the Christian life. 

The Son of Mary was a revelation to the mother 



The Mothers Wonder. 41 

in whose care He lived. So a man's soul, his spirit- 
ual nature which is intrusted to his care, is a per- 
petual revelation to him. If you can only know that 
your soul is God's child, that He is caring for it and 
training it, then it may become to you the source of 
deep divine communications. God will speak to you 
through your own mysterious life. He will show 
you his wisdom and goodness, not in the heaven 
above you, but in the soul within you. He will make 
you His fellow-worker in that which is the most di- 
vine work of His of which we can have any know- 
ledge, the training and perfecting of a soul. That 
is the privilege of every man who knows, and finds 
his life and joy in knowing, that the soul which lives 
within him, the soul which he calls his soul, is the 
child of God. 



SERMON III. 

®fte ©httwft of tint pvi»j[ «. 

A DOMESTIC MISSIONARY SERMON. 

" The Church of the living God."—l Tim. iii. 15. 

I WANT to preach to you to-day about the Church. 
It has grown to be our habit on this Sunday morn- 
ing, when we annually make our contribution for Do- 
mestic Missions, to speak especially and definitely 
about the Church; not, that is, directly of the personal 
Christian experience, but of the great corporate body 
of Christian life throughout the world, and especially 
of that particular organization in which we live and 
worship, and whose work in our own country we are 
to contribute to extend. If the Church is often 
thought about, and talked about, in a petty and me- 
chanical and formal way, let us be very careful, if 
we can, to avoid formality and pettiness in our talk 
of her to-day. Let us try to make her seem what 
she really is, the Church of the living God, and the 
Home of living men. 

Let us begin then with one of the most pictu- 
resque and striking and perhaps perplexing incidents 

which occur in the Church's life. A minister is called 
42 



/? 



The Church of the Living God. 43 

upon fco baptize a little dying child. It is an infant of 
a day. A ray of light has come from heaven, and 
just flashed for an instant into the great flood of 
sunlight, and now is being gathered back again into 
the darkness out of which it came. The minister 
goes and baptizes the unconscious child. He does an 
act which perhaps to those who stand around, seems 
like the blankest superstition. " What does it mean?" 
they say. " Have a little sprinkled water and a few 
whispered words any influence upon this flickering 
flame of life which in a moment is to go out? If 
the child is to live elsewhere after its brief life here 
on earth is over, will this ceremony do it any good ? 
If it revives and lives its life out here on earth, will 
it live any better for this hurried incantation?" 
Meanwhile, to the minister, and to the Church O/f 
which he is a minister, that baptism of the dying 
child has a profound and beautiful significance. It 
is not thought of for a moment as the saving of the 
child's soul. The child dying unbaptized goes to the 
same loving care and education which awaits the 
child baptized. But the baptism is the solemn, 
grateful, tender recognition, during the brief mo- 
ments of that infant's life on earth, of the deep mean- 
ings of his humanity. It is the human race in its 
profoundest self- consciousness welcoming this new 
member to its multitude. Only for a few moments 
does he tarry in this condition of humanity; his life 
touches the earth only to leave it; but in those few 
moments of his tarrying, humanity lifts up its hand 
and claims him. She says, " You are part of me, and 






44 The Church of the Living God. 

being part of me, you are part of me forever. Your 
life may disappear from mortal sight almost before 
we have seen it, but, wherever it may go, it is a hu- 
man life forever. It belongs to God, as, and because 
humanity belongs to Him." Humanity, recognizing 
itself as belonging to God, recognizes this infant 
portion of herself as belonging to Him, claims it for 
Him, takes it into her own most consecrated hopes, 
appropriates for it that redemption of Christ which 
revealed man's belonging to God, declares it a mem- 
ber of that Church which is simply humanity as be- 
longing to God, the divine conception of humanity, 
her own realization of herself as it belongs to God. 

Can there be any act more full of significance, 
more free from superstition ? And is there not in 
this act, just because of the feeble unconsciousness 
of the child to whom it is administered, the most 
distinct indication of the nature of the Church into 
which he is admitted ? There is no fact developed 
yet about the child except his pure humanity. We 
know nothing whatsoever about his talents, or his 
character. It makes no difference whether he is 
rich or poor. He may lie cradled in daintiest lace, 
or in most squalid rags. Beauty or ugliness, bright- 
ness or dullness, friendship or friendlessness, good 
blood or bad blood, are not taken into account; we 
baptize him, be he what he may, so that only he is a 
human creature, the child of human parents, the 
sharer of our human nature; we baptize him into the 
fellowship of consecrated humanity, into the Church 
of the living God. 



The Church of the Living God. 45 

Have we not then presented to us in this simple 
ceremony, which to one bystander may seem so in- 
significant and to another so superstitious, the deep- 
est and broadest meaning of the Christian Church ? 
It is the body of redeemed humanity. It is man in 
his deepest interests, in his spiritual possibilities. It 
is the under-life, the sacred, the profounder life of 
man, his re-generation. Every human being in very 
virtue of birth into the redeemed world is a poten- 
tial member of the Christian Church. His baptism 
claims and asserts his membership. 

And now suppose that Baptism were universal, and 
suppose that instead of being, what it is so often, 
even among Christian people, a formal ceremony, 
everywhere it were a living act, instinct with mean- 
ing, what a world this would be ! Every new-born 
immortal welcomed by the whole spiritual conscious- 
ness of his race ! There is some true sense, we may 
well believe, in which the physical life of humanity 
grows richer through its whole substance by the 
added life of each new body. Just in proportion as 
the spiritual is more sensitive than the physical, 
may we not hold that the spirituality of the whole 
race is richer for the access of this new soul ? Bap- 
tism is the utterance of the rejoicing welcome. The 
whole world of spiritual capacity thrills with de 
light and expectation. The Church accepts its new 
member and undertakes his education. For what 
time he is to be in her, a part of her, before he goes 
to his eternal place to be a member of the Church in 
heaven, whether it be for a few short hours or for a 



46 The Church of the JLiving God, 

long eighty years, the Church belongs to him and he 
belongs to the Church. If he does good work it is 
the Church's gain and glory. If he sins, and is 
profligate, it is as a member of the Church that he is 
wicked. The Church is spiritual humanity, and he, 
a spiritual human being, is, by that very fact, a 
Churchman. 

1 cannot tell you, my dear friends, how strongly 
this view takes possession of me the longer that I 
live. I cannot think, I will not think about the 
Christian Church as if it were a selection out of 
humanity. In its idea it is humanity. The hard, 
iron-faced man whom I meet upon the street, the 
degraded, wad-faced man who goes to prison, the 
weak, silly-faced man who haunts society, the dis- 
couraged, sad-faced man who drags the chain of 
drudgery, they are all members of the Church', mem- 
bers of Christ, children of God, heirs of the kingdom 
of heaven. Their birth made them so. Their bap- 
tism declared the truth which their birth made true. 
It is impossible to estimate their lives aright, unless 
we give this truth concerning them the first impor- 
tance. 

Think too, what would be the meaning of the other 
sacrament, if this thought of the Church of the liv- 
ing God were real and universal. The Lord's Supper, 
the right and need of every man to feed on God, the 
bread of divine sustenance, the wine of divine inspi- 
ration offered to every man, and turned by every man 
into what form of spiritual force the duty and the 
nature of each man required, how grand and glorious 



The Church of the Living God. 47 

its mission might become ! No longer the mystic 
source of unintelligible influence; no longer cer- 
tainly the test of arbitrary othodoxy ; no longer the 
initiation rite of a selected brotherhood ; but the 
great sacrament of man ! The seeker after truth, 
with all the world of truth freely open before him, 
would come to the Lord's table, to refresh the freedom 
of his soul, to liberate himself from slavery and pre- 
judice. The soldier going forth to battle, the student 
leaving college, the legislator setting out for Wash- 
ington, the inventor just upon the brink of the last 
combination which would make his invention perfect, 
the merchant getting ready for a sharp financial crisis, 
all men full of the passion of their work, would come 
there to the Lord's Supper to fill their passion with 
the divine fire of consecration. They would meet and 
know their unity in beautiful diversity — this Christian 
Church around the Christian feast. There is no 
other rallying place for all the good activity and 
worthy hopes of man. It is in the power of the 
great Christian Sacrament, the great human sacra- 
ment, to become that rallying-place. Think how it 
would be, if some morning all the men, women and 
children in this city who mean well, from the re- 
former meaning to meet some giant evil at the peril 
of his life to the school boy meaning to learn his 
day's lesson with all his strength, were to meet in a 
great host at the table of the Lord, and own them- 
selves His children, and claim the strength of His 
bread and wine, and then go out with calm, strong, 
earnest faces to their work. How the communion 



48 The Church of the Living God. 

service would lift up its voice and sing itself in 
triumph, the great anthem of dedicated human life. 
Ah, my friends, that, nothing less than that, is the 
real Holy Communion of the Church of the living 
God. 

And then the ministry, the ministers, what a life 
theirs must be, whenever the Church thus comes to 
realize itself! We talk to-day, as if the ministers 
of the Church were consecrated for the people. The 
old sacerdotal idea of substitution has not died 
away. Sometimes it is distinctly proclaimed and 
taught. What is the release from such a false idea? 
Not to teach that the ministers are not consecrated, 
but to teach that all the people are ; not to deny the 
priesthood of the Clergy, but to assert the priesthood 
of all men. We can have no hope, I believe, of the de- 
struction of the spirit of hierarchy by direct attack. 
It may be smitten down a thousand times. A thou- 
sand times it will rise again. Only when all men 
become full of the sense of the sacredness of their 
own life, will the assumption of supreme clerical 
sacredness find itself overwhelmed with the great 
rising tide. The fault of all onslaughts upon the 
lofty claims of the ministry has been here. They have 
vociferously declared that ministers w T ere no better 
than other men. They have not bravely and devoted- 
ly claimed for all men, the right and power to be as 
good and holy and spiritual as any St. John has ever 
been in his consecrated ministry. When that great 
claim is made and justified in life, then, not till then, 
lordship over God's heritage shall disappear and the 



The Church of the Living God. 49 

true greatness of the minister, as the fellow-worker 
with and servant of the humblest and most stru^- 
gling child of God, shall shine out on the world. 

Yet once more, here must be seen the true place 
and dignity of truth and doctrine. It is not knowl- 
edge anywhere that is the end and purpose of man's 
labor or of God's government. It is life. It is the 
full activity of powers. Knowledge is a means to 
that. ( Why is it that the Church has magnified doc- 
trine overmuch and throned it where it does not be- 
long? It is because the Church has not cared enough 
for life. She has not overvalued doctrine; she has 
undervalued life?) When the Church learns that she 
is in her idea simply identical with all nobly active 
humanity, when she thinks of herself as the true in- 
spirer and purifier of all the life of man, then she will — 
what ? Not cast her doctrines away, as many of her 
impetuous advisers bid her do ; she will see their val- 
ue, their precious value, as she never has seen it yet; 
but she will hold them always as the means of life, 
and she will insist that out of their depths they 
shall send forth manifest strength for life which 
shall justify her holding them. 

The decrying of dogma in the interest of life, of 
creed in the interest of conduct, is very natural, but 
very superficial. It is superficial because, if it 
succeeded, it would make life and conduct blind 
and weak. But it is natural because it is the crude 
healthy outburst of human protest against the value 
of dogma for its own sake, of which the Church 
has always been too full. Let us not join in it. 



50 The Church of the Living God. 

Let us insist that it is good for man to know every- 
thing he can know, and believe everything he can 
believe of the truth of God. But while we will not 
pull down dogma, let us do all we can to build up 
life about dogma, and demand of dogma that service 
which it is the real joy of her heart to render to life. 
I will not hear men claim that the doctrine of the 
Trinity has no help or inspiration to give to the mer- 
chant or the statesman. It has great help, great in- 
spiration. I will not hear men claim that it means 
nothing to the scholar or the bricklayer whether he 
believes or disbelieves in the Atonement. It means 
very much to either. Out of the heart of those doc- 
trines I must demand the help and inspiration which 
they have to give. Then I must do all that I can to 
make the life which needs that help and inspiration 
hungry for them. 1 must do all that I can to make 
the world's ordinary operations know their sacredness 
and crave the sacred impulse which the dogmas have 
to give. I must summon all life to look up to the 
hills. I must teach the world that it is the Church, 
and needs and has a right to all the Church's privi- 
leges, and so make it cry out to the truths of the 
Trinity and Atonement to open the depths of their 
helpfulness, as they never have heard the call to 
open them when only theologians were calling on 
them to complete their theologic systems, or only a 
few special souls were asking them for special com- 
forts or assistance. Here, in the assertion of the 
great human Church, is the true adjustment of the 



The Church of the Living God. 51 

relations of Doctrine and Life ! Doctrine kept active 
by life. Life kept deep by doctrine. 

Ah, but you say, this does not sound like the New 
Testament. There certainly the Church and the 
world are not the same. They are not merely differ- 
ent ; they are hostile to each other. There is a per- 
petual conflict between the two. Indeed there is; 
But what Church and what world are fighting to- 
gether there ? The Church is a little handful of 
half-believers. The world is a great ocean of sensu- 
ality and secularity and sin. Of course between 
those two there is an everlasting conflict, so long as 
each is what it is. The world distrusts the Church, 
in part at least, because it feels coming out from it 
110 spiritual power. The Church dreads the world, 
which is always dragging it down from its imper- 
fect loyalty and consecration. But he has listened 
very carelessly to the New Testament who has not 
heard in it the muffled, buried voices of another 
Church and another world, crying out for life! 
A Church completely strong in faith, not standing 
guard over herself, but boldly claiming all the world 
in all of its activities for Christ, and a world con- 
scious of its belonging to divinity, counting its sin 
and intrusion an anomaly, a world ashamed and 
hungry, the world of which St. Paul dreamed, the 
groaning and travailing creation. How often as we 
read the New Testament, this deeper Church and 
this deeper world are dimly seen and faintly heard 
beneath this present faithlessness and sin. LIow, 
whenever they are seen and heard, 'we recognize, be- 



52 The Church of the Living God. 

yond a doubt, that they are the true Church, and the 
true world, and that every departure from or falling 
short of them is a loss of the Church's or the world's 
reality. And how, when the true Church and the 
true world stand before us, we see and know that 
they are not in conflict ; that they are in perfect har- 
mony; nay, far more than that, that they are identi- 
cal with one another. 

There is no fight so fierce and vehement as that 
which rages between two beings which ought to be 
perfectly one, but which, because each falls short of 
what it was designed to be, are now in conflict with 
each other. So long as the Church and the world are 
what they are there must be discord. We who are 
in the Church must keep watchful guard over her, 
and must dread and oppose the evil influences of the 
world. But at the same time we never must let 
ourselves forget that all this is unnatural. AVe 
must never lose out of our sight the vision, never 
lose out of our ears the music of the real Church and 
the real world struggling each into perfection for 
itself, and so both into unity and identity with one 
another. 

Very interesting have been in history the pulsa- 
tions, the brightening and fading, the coming and 
going of this great truth of the Church and the 
world ideally identical. That truth is always present 
in the words of Jesus. He told his disciples how 
they were to fight with the actual world, to be per- 
secuted by it, even to be murdered by it. But he 
was always pointing abroad and saying, " The field 



The Chitrch of the Living God. 53 

is the world." The ideal Church, which was the real 
Church in his eyes, knew 110 limit but humanity. 

By-and-by came the persecutions of the early 
Church, and they drove the Church in upon itself, 
and made the few believers think of themselves as 
outcasts and exceptions. The intensity of their per- 
sonal experiences dulled and dimmed the thought of 
their being simply representatives of all humanity. 
The Church lived like a sect of souls with special 
privileges and illuminations. 

The mediaeval Church in its own way caught 
sight again of the idea of universality, but it was 
formal and selfish. It did not think of itself as ful- 
filling the life of the world, but of the world as ex- 
isting for it, and to be practically swallowed up in 
its dominion. Still it had some notion of it and the 
world coming to identity with one another, though 
it was almost the identity of the wolf with the 
sheep which he has devoured. 

With the Protestant Reformation came another in- 
tense assertion of the personal nature of religion, 
and the larger aspects, the world-meaning of the 
Church, was lost or lay in silence. Calvinism was 
too busy with the intense problem of the individual 
soul to think much of the great Redemption of the 
world, of all humanity. 

But now, when in these latter days, there are so 
many signs that we are passing into a new region, 
beyond the strong immediate power of the Reforma- 
tion which has prevailed from the sixteenth century 
till now, it is the relation of the Church to the act- 



54 The Church of the Living God. 

ive world, the conflict and the possible harmony be- 
tween them, the message of the Church to the world, 
the turning of the world into the Church, these are 
the problems and the visions which are more and 
more occupying the minds of thoughtful vision-see- 
ing men. 

Such alternations and pulsations cannot go on for- 
ever. The hostility of the Church to the world, and 
the conformity of the Church to the world, neither 
of them is the final condition, nor shall the Church 
vacillate between them always. Gradually, slowly, 
but at last surely, this must come forth which we 
saw testified even in the hurried baptism of the lit- 
tle child who made this earth his home but for a 
single day, that the earth is the Lord's, and so that 
to be living in this earth is to belong to God; and 
that all human life is by the very fact of its human- 
ity a portion of His Church. 

I think that we can do the best work in the Chris- 
tian Church only in the light of that truth cordially 
acknowledged. Because that truth is coming to 
more and more cordial acknowledgment, I believe 
that the Christian Church is becoming a better and 
a better place to work in every year. If I ask where 
in the Christian Church one can best live and work, 
I answer myself that it will be where that truth is 
most vital, where it makes most strongly the real 
power of the Church's life. 

And this brings me to what little I want to say 
about our own Church, on this morning when we are 
to make our annual contribution for the extension of 



The Church of the Living God. 55 

her work. We value and love our Communion very 
deeply. To many of us she has been the nurse, al- 
most the mother of our spiritual life. To all of us 
she is endeared by long companionship, and by famil- 
iar sympathy in the profoundest experiences through 
which our souls have passed. When we deliberately 
turn our backs for a moment upon all these rich and 
sweet associations, and ask ourselves in colder and 
more deliberate consideration, why it is that we be- 
lieve in our Episcopal Church and rejoice to com- 
mend her to our fellow-countrymen and fellow-men; 
the answer which I find myself giving, is that our 
Church seems to me to be truly trying to realize this 
relation to the whole world, this sacredness of all 
life, this ideal belonging of all men to the Church of 
Christ, which, as I have been saying, is the great 
truth of active Christianity. I find the signs of such 
an effort, in the very things for which some people 
fear or blame our Church. I find it in the impor- 
tance which she gives to Baptism and in the breadth 
of her conception of that rite ; for Baptism is the 
strongest visible assertion of this truth. I find it in 
her simplicity of doctrine. I find it in the value 
which she sets on worship; her constant summons to 
all men not merely to be preached to, but to pray ; 
her firm belief in the ability and right of all men to 
offer prayer to God. I find it in her strong historic 
spirit, her sense of union with the ages which have 
past out of sight and of whose men we know only 
their absolute humanity. 
In all these things I recognize the true, strong ten- 



56 The Church of the Living God. 

dency which, our Church has to draw near to the life 
of the world, and to draw the world's life near to her. 
In this tendency all true Churchmen must rejoice. 
Her breadth of doctrine, her devoutness, and her clear 
hold upon the long history of human life, all these 
qualify her for a great work in bringing up human- 
ity, and making it know itself for what it is, the true 
universal Church of the Living God, toward which all 
ecclesiastical establishments which have thus far ex- 
isted in the world, have been attempts, of which they 
have been preparatory studies. 

Can our Church do any such great office as this 
for the America in which she is set ? There are some 
of her children who love to call her in exclusive 
phrase The American Church. She is not that ; and to 
call her that would be to give her a name to which 
she has no right. The American Church is the great 
total body of Christianity in America, in many divi- 
sions, under many names, broken, discordant, disjoint- 
ed, often quarrelsome and disgracefully jealous, part 
of part, yet as a whole bearing perpetual testimony 
to the people of America of the authority and love 
of God, of the redemption of Christ, and of the sa- 
cred possibili ties of man. If our Church does especial 
work in our country, it most be by the especial and 
peculiar way in which she is able to bear that wit- 
ness ; not by any fiction of an apostolical succession 
in her ministry, which gives to them alone a right to 
bear such witness. There is no such peculiar privi- 
lege of commission belonging to her or any other 
body. The only right of any body lies in the earnest 



The Church of the Living God. 57 

will and in the manifest power. The right to preach 
the Gospel to America lies in the earnest faith that 
the Gospel is the only salvation of the people, first 
as men, and then as Americans; whoever brings that 
faith has the right to preach; whoever does not bring 
it has no right, be the fancied regularity of his com- 
mission what it may ! 

In some sense there has been reason to fear, and 
there is still reason to fear, that what makes part of 
the strength of our Church, may also make part of 
its weakness. Its historic sense binds it, in a very 
live way, to the sources from which it immediately 
sprang, and tempts it to treasure overmuch its 
association with the great Church of another land, 
the Church of England. So long as it does that it 
can never truly be the Church of America. So long 
as it prefers to import customs and costumes, names 
and ways, instead of creating them here out of the 
soil on which she lives, she will be what she has been 
in very much of her history, what she is in many 
parts of the land to-day, an exotic and not a true 
part of the nation's life. The Episcopal Church's only 
real chance of powerful life, is in the more and more 
complete identification of herself with the genius and 
national life of America. 

To do that, she must become a great moral power. 
No careful preservation of the purity of doctrine, no 
strictness of ecclesiastical propriety, can take the 
place of moral strength. It is by the conscience, 
that the Church must take hold of this people. It is 
in the conscience, that the nation is uneasy. In its 



53 The Chtcrch of the Living God. 

uneasy conscience, it sees the vision and hears the 
voices of the life it might be living. To the con- 
science of the nation then, the Church that is must 
speak to tell the nation of the Church that it might 
be. The Church which forty years ago had bravely 
cried oiit at the sin of slavery, would be more power- 
ful than we can imagine in America to-day. The 
Church which to-day effectively denounces intem- 
perance, and the licentiousness of social life, the 
cruelty or indifference of the rich to the poor, and 
the prostitution of public office, will become the real 
Church of America. Our Church has done some 
good service here. She ought to do much more. 
Largely the Church of the rich, she ought to rebuke 
rich men's vices and to stir rich men's torpidity. 
She ought to blow her trumpet in the ears of the 
young men of fortune, summoning them from their 
clubs and their frivolities to do the chivalrous work, 
which their nobility obliges them to do for fellow- 
man. She ought to speak to Culture, and teach it its 
responsibility. She ought to make real contributions 
to the creation of that atmosphere of brotherhood 
and hope and reverence for man, in which alone there 
is any chance that the hard social and economical 
problems of the present and the future can find 
solution. If she can do such things as these, she 
will be following in the steps of all the largest 
minded, deepest-hearted Fathers of the Church, all 
the way from St. Paul down. That is the true 
apostolical succession. That she must not boast 



The Church of the Living God. 59 

that she has, but she mast struggle more and more 
earnestly to win. 

My friends, it is not possible for the true man to 
think of his Church without thinking of his country. 
I cannot be the Churchman that I ought without 
being a patriot. On this Sunday morning, when we 
plead for our Church, let the image of our country 
stand before us, with her chances, with her dangers, 
with her glories, with, her sins ! We are glad indeed 
that our Church is not the only church which is 
laboring for the land's salvation. We rejoice in all 
that our brother Christians of other names are doing; 
but we believe in the work which our Church has to 
do. We pray to God, keep her simple, brave and 
earnest, free from fantasticalness and cowardice and 
selfishness, that she may do it. We look on, and 
far, far away we see the Nation-church, the land 
all full of Christ, the Nation-church, a true part of 
the World-church, issuing into glorious life, and 
swallowing up our small ecclesiasticisms, as the sun 
grandly climbing up the heavens swallows up the 
scattered rays which he sent out at his rising. And 
full of that vision, we are ready to do what we can to 
make our Church strong for the work which it must 
do in preparation for that day ! 



> 






SERMON IV. */ 

"And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God." 
Revelation xx. 12. 

THE life which we are living now is more aware 
than we know of the life which is to come. 
Death, which separates the two, is not, as it has been 
so often pictured, like a great thick wall. It is rather 
like a soft and yielding curtain, through which we 
cannot see, but which is always waving and trem- 
bling with the impulses that come out of the life 
which lies upon the other side of it. We are never 
wholly unaware that the curtain is not the end of 
everything. Sounds come to us, muffled and dull, but 
still indubitably real, through its thick folds. Every 
time that a new soul passes through that vail from 
mortality to immortality, it seems as if we heard its 
light footfalls for a moment after the jealous curtain 
has concealed it from our sight. As each soul passes, 
it almost seems as if the opening of the curtain to let 
it through were going to give us a sight of the un- 
seen things beyond ; and, though Ave are forever dis- 
appointed, the shadowy expectation always conies 
GO 



Standing Before God. 6\ 

back to us again, when we see the curtain stirred by 
another friend's departure. After our friend has 
passed, we can almost see the curtain, which he 
stirred, moving, tremulously for a while, before it 
settles once more into stillness. 

Eehind this curtain of death, St. John, in his 
great vision, passed, and he has written down for us 
what he saw there. He has not told us many 
things; and probably we cannot know how great 
the disappointment must have been if he had tried 
to translate -into our mortal language all the ineffable 
wonders of eternity. But he has told us much ; and 
most of what we want to know is wrapped up in 
this simple and sublime declaration, " I saw the 
dead, small and great, stand before God." 

I think that it grows clearer and clearer to us all 
that what we need are the great truths, the vast and 
broad assurances within which are included all the 
special details of life. Let us have them, and we 
are more and more content to leave the special 
details unknown. With regard to eternity, for in- 
stance, I am sure that we can most easily, nay, most 
gladly, forego the detailed knowledge of the circum- 
stances and occupations of the other life, if only we 
can fully know two things — that the dead are, and 
that they are with God. All beside these two things 
we can most willingly leave undiscovered. And those 
two things, if we can believe St. John, are sure. 

" I saw the dead, small and great, stand before 
God." What is meant by " standing before God?" 
We are apt to picture to ourselves a great dramatic 



62 Standing Before God. 

scene. Host beyond host, rank behind rank, the 
millions who have lived upon the earth, all standing 
crowded together in the indescribable presence of 
One who looks not merely at the mass but at the 
individual, and sees through the whole life and char- 
acter of every single soul. The picture is sublime, 
and it is what the words of St. John are intended to 
suggest. But we must get behind the picture to 
its meaning. The picture must describe not one 
scene only, but the whole nature and condition of the 
everlasting life. The souls of men in the eternal 
world are always " standing before God." And what 
does that mean ? We understand at once, if we con- 
sider that that before which a man stands is the stand- 
ard, or test, or source of judgment for his life. Every 
man stands before something which is his judge. 
The child stands before the father. Not in a single 
act, making report of what he has been doing on 
a special day, but in the whole posture of his life, 
almost as if the father was a mirror in whom he saw 
himself reflected, and from whose reflection of him- 
self he got at once a judgment as to what he was, 
aud suggestions as to what he ought to be. The 
poet stands before nature. She is his judge. A cer- 
tain felt harmony or discord between his nature and 
her ideal is the test and directing power of his life. 
The philosopher stands before the unseen and ma- 
jestic presence of the abstract truth. The philan- 
thropist stands before humanity. The artist stands 
before beauty. The legislator stands before justice. 
The politician stands before that vague but awful 



Standing Before God. 63 

embodiment of average character, the people, the 
demos. The fop, in miserable servility, stands before 
fashion, the feeblest and ficklest of tyrants. The 
scholar stands before knowledge, and gets the satisfac- 
tions or disappointments of his life from the approv- 
als or disapprovals of her serene and gracious lips. 

You see what the words mean. Every soul that 
counts itself capable of judgment and responsibility, 
stands in some presence by which the nature of its 
judgment is decreed. The higher the presence, the 
loftier and greater, though often the more oppressed 
and anxious, is the life. A weak man, who wants to 
shirk the seriousness and anxiety of life, goes down 
into some lower chamber and stands before some 
baser judge whose standard will be least exacting. 
A strong, ambitious man presses up from judgment 
room to judgment room, and is not satisfied with 
meeting any standard perfectly so long as there is 
any higher standard which he has not faced. Greater 
than anything else in education, vastly greater than 
any question about how many facts and sciences a 
teacher may have taught his pupil, there must always 
be this other question, into what presence he has in- 
troduced him ; before what standard he has made his 
pupil stand : for in the answer to that question are 
involved all the deepest issues of the pupil's charac- 
ter and life. 

And now St. John declares that when he passed 
behind the vail, he saw the dead, small and great, 
stand before God. Do you not see now what that 
means ? Out of all the lower presences with which 



64 Standing Before God. 

they have made themselves contented; out of all the 
chambers where the little easy judges sit with tneir 
compromising codes of conduct, with their ideas 
worked over and worked down to suit the conditions 
of this earthly life ; out of all these partial and imper- 
fect judgment chambers, when men die they are all 
carried up into the presence of the perfect righteous- 
ness, and are judged by th atj All previous judg- 
ments go for nothing unless they find their confirma- 
tion there. Men who have been the pets and favor- 
ites of society, and of the populace, and of their own 
self-esteem, the change that death has made to them 
is that they have been compelled to face another 
standard and to feel its unfamiliar awfulness. Just 
think of it. A man who, all his life on earth since 
he was a child, has never once asked himself 
about any action, about any plan of his, is this 
right ? Suddenly, when he is dead, behold, he finds 
himself in a new world, where that is the only ques- 
tion about everything. His old questions as to 
whether a thing was comfortable, or was popular, or 
was profitable, are all gone. The very atmosphere 
of this new world kills them. And upon the 
amazed soul, from every side there pours this new, 
strange, searching question: "Is it right?" Out of the 
ground he walks on, out of the walls which shelter 
and restrain him, out of the canopy of glory over- 
head, out of strange, unexplored recesses of his own 
newly-awakened life, from every side comes pressing 
in upon him that one question, " Is it right ?" That 
is what it is for that dead man to "stand before God." 



Standing Before God. 65 

And then there is another soul which, before it 
passed through death, while it was in this world, had 
always been struggling after higher presences. Re- 
fusing to ask whether acts were popular or profit- 
able, refusing even to care much whether they were 
comfortable or beautiful, it had insisted upon asking 
whether each act was right. It had always struggled 
to keep its moral vision clear. It had climbed to 
heights of seli-sacrifice that it might get above the 
miasma of low standards which lay upon the earth. 
In every darkness about what was right, it had been 
true to the best light it could see. It had grown 
into a greater and greater incapacity to live in any 
other presence, as it had struggled longer and longer 
for this highest company. Think what it must be 
for that soul, when for it, too, death sweeps every other 
chamber back and lifts the nature into the pure light 
of the unclouded righteousness. Now for it, too, the 
question, "Is it right?" rings from every side ; but in 
that question this soul hears the echo of its own best- 
loved standard. Not in mockery, but in invitation ; not 
tauntingly, but temptingly ; the everlasting goodness 
seems to look in upon the soul from all that touches 
it. That is what it is for that soul to " stand before 
God." God opens his own heart to that soul and is 
both Judgment and Love. They are not separate. 
He is Love because He is Judgment ; for to be judged 
by Him, to meet His judgment is what the soul has 
been long and ardently desiring. Tell me, when two 
such souls as these stand together " before God," are 
they not judged by their very standing there ? Are 



66 Standing Before God. 

not the deep content of one, and the perplexed dis- 
tress of the other, already their heaven and their hell ? 
Do you need a pit of fire, and a city of gold, to em- 
phasize their difference ? When the dead, small and 
great, stand before God, is not the book already 
opened, and are not the dead already judged ? 

"The dead, small and great," St. John says that 
he saw standing before God. In that great judgment- 
day, another truth is that the difference of sizes 
among human lives, of which we make so much, 
passes away, and all human beings, in simple virtue 
of their human quality, are called to face the everlast- 
ing righteousness. The child and the greybeard, the 
scholar and the boor, however their lives may have 
been separated here, they come together there. See 
how this falls in with what I said before. It is upon 
the moral ground that the most separated souls must 
always meet. Upon the child and the philosopher 
alike rests the common obligation not to lie, but to tell 
the truth. The scholar and the plow-boy both are 
bound to be pure and to be merciful. Differently as 
they may have to fulfil their duties, the duties are the 
same for both. Intellectual sympathies are limited. 
The more men study, the more they separate them- 
selves into groups with special interests. But moral 
sympathies are universal. The more men try to do 
right, the more they come into communion with all 
other men who are engaged in the same struggle all 
through the universe. Therefore it is that before the 
moral judgment seat of God all souls, the small and 
great, are met together. All may be good — all 



Standing Before God. 67 

may be bad; therefore, before Him, whose nature is 
the decisive touchstone of goodness and badness in 
every nature which is laid upon it, all souls of all 
the generations of mankind may be assembled. 

Think what a truth that is. We try to find some 
meeting ground for all humanity, and what we find 
is always proving itself too narrow or too weak. The 
one only place where all can meet, and every soul 
claim its relationship with every other soul, is before 
the throne of God. The Father's presence alone fur- 
nishes the meeting-place for all the children, regard- 
less of differences of age or wisdom. The grave and 
learned of this earth shall come up there before God, 
and find, standing in His presence, that all which 
they have truly learned has not taken them out of 
the sympathy of the youngest and simplest of their 
Father's children. On the other hand, the simple 
child, who has timidly gazed afar off upon the great 
minds of his race, when he comes to stand with 
them before God, will find that he is not shut out 
from them. He has a key which will unlock their doors 
and let him enter into their lives. Because they are 
obeying the same God whom he obeys, therefore He 
has some part in the eternal life of Abraham, and 
Moses, and Paul. Not directly, but through the God 
before whom both of them stand, the small and 
great come together. The humility of the highest 
and the self-respect of the lowest are both perfectly 
attained. The children, who have not been able to 
understand or hold communion with each other di- 
rectly, meet perfectly together in the Fathers house, 



68 Standing Before God, 

and the dead, small and great, stand in complete 
sympathy and oneness before God. 

Another thought which is suggested by St. 
John's verse, is the easy comprehension of the finite 
by the infinite. All the dead of all the generations 
stand before God together. How such a picture 
sends our imagination back. We think how many 
men have died upon the earth. We think of all the 
ages and of all the lands. We think of all the un- 
counted myriads who died before history began. 
We see the dusk of the world's earliest memory 
crowded with graves. We let our minds begin to 
count the countless dead of Asia, with its teeming 
kingdoms ; of this America of ours, with its sugges- 
tions of extinguished races. We remember the earth- 
quakes, the battle fields, the pestilences. We hear 
the helpless wail of infancy, which, in all the genera- 
tions, has just crept upon the earth long enough to 
claim life with one plaintive cry, and die. Where 
should we stop ? We know that " All that tread the 
globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber 
in its bosom;" and yet how crowded is the globe to- 
day. Not one must be left out ! We heap up mil- 
lions upon, millions until we weary of the mere reit- 
eration, and numbers cease to have a meaning. And 
yet not one must be left out ! All must be there. 
All the dead, small and great, out of all the ages; 
out of all the lands ! All the dead, small and great, 
are standing before God. Is there an effort more 
staggering than this, the effort to gather up in 
our imagination all the hosts of humanity, and be- 



Standing Before God. 69 

lieve in the true immortality of every one of them ? 

Here, I think, is where the faith of many men in 
their own immortality staggers the most. If only 
there were not so many of us ! A man feels his own 
soul, and its very existence seems to promise him that 
he is immortal. And in his brethren, whose life he 
watches, he sees the same signs that for them too 
there is another life. But when he looks abroad, the 
multitude dismays him. There are so many souls. 
What w r orld can hold them all ? What care can re- 
cognize, and cover and embrace them all ? If 
there only were not so many of us ! The thought of 
one's own immortality sinks like a tired soldier on a 
battle-field, overwhelmed and buried under the multi- 
tude of the dead. Have not many of you felt this 
bewilderment ? I think that it is one of the most 
common forms in which perplexity, not clear and 
definite, but vague and terribly oppressive, lays itself 
upon a human soul. What can we say to it ? How 
can we grasp and believe in this countless army of 
immortals who come swarming up out of all the lands 
and all the ages ? There is only one way. Multiply 
numbers as enormously as you will, and the result 
is finite still. Then set the finite, however large, into 
the presence of the infinite, and it is small. Its limi- 
tations show. There is no finite, however vast, that 
can overcrowd the infinite; none that the infinite 
cannot most easily grasp and hold. 

Now, St. John says, that he saw all the hosts of 
the dead stand " before God." We too must see 
them stand before God, and they will not oppress us. 



yo Standing Before God. 

For God is infinite, and a thousand million draughts 
come no nearer to exhausting infinity than ten would 
come. Here must be the real solution of our diffi- 
culty, in the infinity of God. You say, "I can have five 
friends and understand them, and discriminate be- 
tween them, and love them all; but give me fifty 
friends and you swamp me in the ocean of their needs. 
I have not intelligence, nor care, nor sympathy 
enough to comprehend them all." But make yourself 
infinite, and then the difficulty disappears. Unnum- 
bered souls may stand before you then, and you can 
open a vastness of nature which shall take them all 
in, and be to each one just as much a friend as if there 
were no others; yet being all the while the compre- 
hending and including presence which embraces all. 

Be sure that if you will begin not by counting the 
multitude of the dead, and asking yourself how any 
celestial meadow where you can picture them assem- 
bled can hold them all, but by lifting yourself up and 
laying hold on the infinity of God, you will find range 
enough in Him for all the marvellous conception of 
the immortality of all men. ( Every thought of man 
depends upon what you first think of God. Make 
your thought of God large enough, and there is no 
thought of man too large for you to think within it. 

Take, then, these three ideas, and I think that we 
can see something of what it must have been for 
souls to stand, as John the Evangelist in his great 
vision saw them standing before God. They had 
gone up above all the small and temporary standards, 
and laid their lives close upon the one perfect and 



Standing Before God. 71 

eternal standard by which men must be judged. No 
longer did it matter to them whether they were rich 
or poor, whether men praised them, or abused them, 
or pitied them. The one question about themselves, 
into which all other questions gathered and were 
lost, was whether they were good, whether they 
were obedient to God. 

And then, along with this, there had come to them 
a true and cordial meeting with their brethren. No 
child of their Father was too lofty or too low for them 
to be truly his brethren, when they stood, small and 
great, together before God. 

And yet, again, in presence of the Infinite, they 
had comprehended their immortality. They had 
seen how, within that life to which their lives 
belonged, there was room for a growth which might 
go on to all eternity. 

No wonder that as St. John looked upon that vis- 
ion it filled all his soul with joy. No wonder that he 
hastened back to tell it to the men and women who 
were yet upon the earthward side of the thick curtain 
of death. " I have seen the dead," he cried. " Those 
who have gone from us into the darkness, all our 
friends who have gone so silently, so sorrowfully, 
holding fast to this life as long as they could, going 
into the mystery upon the other side only when they 
must, sending back no word out of the darkness into 
which they went — I have seen them all ! I actually 
looked upon them. Among the millions who have 
gone like them out of all the lands, I saw them. 
They were standing before God. They are living. 



72 Standing Before God. 

They are far more living than you are who are left 
behind them here." Must not the remembrance of 
such a sight have filled his soul with joy ? Must it 
not have been present with him afterward, whenever 
he saw a new soul depart to join the vast company 
whom he had seen standing before God ? 

There is the difference between his view of death 
and ours. He saw what souls go to. We are so apt 
to see only what souls go from. When our friend 
dies we think of all the warm delights of life, all the 
sweet friendships, all the interesting occupations, 
all the splendor of the sunlight which he leaves be- 
hind. If we could only know, somewhat as John 
must have known after his vision, the presence of 
God into which our friend enters on the other side, the 
higher standards, the larger fellowship with all his 
race, and the new assurance of personal immortality 
in God; if we could know all this, how our poor com- 
fortless efforts of comfort when our friends depart, 
our feeble raking-over of the ashes of memory, our 
desperate struggles to think that the inevitable must be 
all right ; how this would all give way to something 
almost like a burst of triumph, as the soul which we 
loved went forth to such vast enlargement, to such 
glorious consummation of its life ! We should be 
able to forget otir own sorrow, or at least to bear it 
gladly, in our thankfulness for him, as the generous 
farmer-boy might see his brother taken from his side 
to be made a king, and toil on himself all the more 
cheerfully at his humble and solitary labor, think- 
ing of the glory to which his brother's life had come. 



Standing Before God, j?> 

It is well, then, with those to whom John's vision 
is fulfilled. Blessed are the dead who die in the 
Lord, and stand immortal before Him. 

And now one question still remains ! Is the ful- 
filment of the vision of St. John for any man to wait 
until that man is dead ? Can only the dead stand 
before God? Think for a moment what we found to 
be the blessings of that standing before God, and 
then consider that those privileges, however they 
may be capable of being given more richly to the soul 
of man in the eternal world, are privileges upon 
whose enjoyment any man's soul may enter here. 
Consider this, and the question at once is answered. 
Already, now, you and I may live by the standards 
of the eternal righteousness, and we may claim our 
brotherhood with the least and the greatest of our 
fellow-men, and we may so Jay hold on God that we 
shall realize our immortality. The soul that has done 
all that, is now standing before God. It does not 
need to push aside the curtain, and to enter into the 
unknown world which lies behind. While the man 
is living here, walking these common streets, living 
in closest intercourse with other men, he is already in 
the everlasting presence, and his heaven has begun. 

But now these are the very things which Jesus 
Christ promises to give, and which he has given to 
multitudes of men. All who will come to Him and 
serve Him are brought thereby to the loftiest stand- 
ards of righteousness, to the broadest and deepest 
human fellowship, and to such a true knowledge of 
God that their own immortality becomes real to them. 



74 Standing Before God. 

Is it not true, then, that Christ does for the soul 
which follows him, that which the experience of the 
eternal world shall take up and certify, and complete ? 
Already in Him we begin to live the everlasting life. 
Already its noble independence, its deep discrimi- 
nation, its generous charity, its large hopefulness, 
its great abounding and inspiring peace gathers 
around and fills the soul which lives in obedience to 
Him. Already, as He himself said, " He that belie v- 
eth on the Son hath everlasting life." 

And yet, while we need not wait till we are dead 
for the privilege and power of " standing before God," 
yet still the knowledge of that loftier and more man- 
ifest standing before Him, w T hich is to come in the un- 
seen land, of which St. John has told us, may make 
more possible the true experience of the divine pres- 
ence which we may have here. Because I am to 
stand before Him in some yet unimagined way, 
seeing Him with some keener sight, hearing His 
words with some quicker hearing which shall 
belong to some new condition of eternity, therefore 
I will be sure that my true life here consists in such a 
degree of realization of His presence, such a 
standing before Him in obedience, and faith, and love, 
as is possible for one in this lower life. 

When the change comes to any of us, my friends, 
how little it will be, if we have really been, through 
the power of Jesus Christ, standing before God, 
in our poor, half-blind way upon the earth. If now, 
in the bright freshness of your youth, you give your- 
self to Christ, and through him do indeed know God 



Standing Before God. 75 

as your dearest friend, years and years hence, when 
the curtain is drawn back for you, and you are bid- 
den to join the host of the dead who stand before God 
eternally, how slight the change will be. Only the 
change from the struggle to the victory, only the 
opening of the dusk and twilight into the perfect day. 
"Well done, good and faithful servant, thou hast 
been faithful over a few things. Enter thou into the 
joy of thy Lord." 



SERMON V. 

<$x#t\ttxUfi& in <3torfet 



Simon, called Peter, and Andrew his or other ; James the son of 
Zebedee, and John his brother." — Matthew x. 2. 



IN the list of the apostles of Jesus there are two 
pairs of brothers. We cannot tell, of course, what 
were the reasons which directed the Master's choice 
among the fishermen of Galilee of those who were to 
preach his Gospel and to be the first pastors of his 
Church; but certainly it is significant and suggestive 
that twice in the small number of the twelve it 
should have happened that the natural tie of broth- 
erhood was emphasized by a common call to the new 
life and a common work in the same service. It 
suggests the relationship which may exist between 
our common human kinships and those loftier and 
diviner influences which are always seeking admis- 
sion to the life of man. 

Simon and Andrew, James and John — they had 
grown up together in their simple homes beside the 
Sea of Galilee, passing on from childhood into youth, 
from youth into manhood, under the same influ- 
ences, keeping, as brothers will keep, that openness 
76 



Brotherhood in Christ. yy 

between their lives which came of the same early 
memories. You know how brothers, however far they 
drift apart, have always doors between their lives 
which keep them in communication. The doors may 
be long blocked up with the great burdens of later life 
which have been piled against them ; the locks may 
have grown rusty and the keys may have been lost; 
yet still the doors are there, and the wall never is quite 
as thick and solid as are the walls which divide other 
lives. The doors may still some day be opened, and 
even while they remain closed, there come sounds 
through them of what is being done upon the other 
side. Surely such relations, never completely closed, 
existing between human creatures all over the 
world, must have something to do with the diffusion 
through human life of any great influence of thought 
or feeling. 

The world is covered with a network of brother- 
hoods. The first and simplest relationships run on 
and out in every direction, and multiply themselves 
till hardly any man stands entirely alone. This net- 
work of brotherhoods, like every evident fact of life, 
sets us to asking three questions — first, what is its 
immediate cause ? second, what is its direct result ? 
and third, what is its final reason ? These are the 
three questions which the thoughtful man asks 
about every fact. 

And with relation to this fact the answer to the 
first two questions is very plain. The cause of this 
interwoven network, this reticulation of life with life, 
is the whole system of nature by which each human 



78 Brotherhood in Christ. 

being takes its start from another human being, and 
is kept, for a time at least, in associations of company 
and dependence with the being from whom it sprang 
and with the other beings who have the same source 
with it. And the direct result of such relationships 
is also plain. They are full of mutual helpfulness 
and pleasure. As to the third question, the answer is 
not so entirely clear and certain. But, as we watch 
and think, it seems to me that we are at least led 
to wonder whether one final cause or purpose of this 
interlacing of life with life, by natural and indisso- 
luble kinships, may not be just this, the providing, as 
it were, of open communications, of a system of 
shafts or channels piercing this human mass in 
every direction, crossing and recrcssing one another, 
through which those higher influences, which ought 
to reach every corner, and every individual of the 
great structural humanity, may be freely carried ev- 
erywhere, and no most remote or insignificant atom 
of the mass be totally and necessarily untouched. 

We have only, 1 think, to picture to ourselves what 
would be the case if there were no such great sys- 
tem of natural relationships covering the earth, 
someAvhere in which every human being found his 
place; and then we see how reasonable it is to think 
that the great system which actually does exist, may 
have been created for this purpose which I have de- 
scribed. Suppose that every human being stood 
alone. Suppose that every atom, however it may 
have come into existence, lay next, indeed, to other 
atoms, but with no lines of brotherhood or any natural 



Brotherhood in Christ. 79 

relationship between them. Can we not feel at once 
how different the world would be ? Every truth or 
power which was to fill the mass would have to be 
communicated separately by a special act to every 
particle. Some little transmission there might be 
from surface to surface, but none from heart to heart, 
of these atoms which were strung upon no cords of 
brotherhood. If the whole mass of mankind were to 
be infused with the knowledge of God's existence, ev- 
ery separate man would have to be convinced with 
his own evidence, and the evidence which persuaded 
his brethren would have no convincingness for him. 
I can imagine only one result. Good influence, right 
thought, true feeling would seem almost of necessity 
to be obliged to lie in pools here and there upon the 
great expanse of human life, wherever it found the 
most sensitive and susceptible minds; great districts 
of humanity being totally unreached, instead of the 
great broad fields, being watered through and 
through. Truth would flash here and there from 
a splendid diamond nature on which it chanced to 
strike, and be but one thin ray of intense light. It 
could not be a suffused radiance varying always in 
depth and richness, but lighting every man and car- 
ried everywhere along the atmosphere in which all 
priests kept brotherhood with one another. 

Our truth is this then — that the natural relations 
which exist between man and man, the relations of 
brotherhood, sisterhood, parenthood, childhood, and 
all the other kinships of mankind, have one at 
least of their purposes, and one of their most sacred 



8o Brotherhood in Christ. 

purposes, in this — that they are God's great system 
along whose lines He means to diffuse his truth and 
influence through the world. They are a structure 
of channels, honeycombing the mass of human life, 
along which the water of life may flow. Look at 
Christ's Incarnation. In Him we know that God 
came into the world. And see how it was that God, 
in Him, appealed to and diffused Himself through 
human life. He sets himself right into the midst of 
a human family. First out through that sacred chan- 
nel which lies forever open between a mother and 
her child, a channel through which the currents 
which flow motherwards are no less strong than the 
currents which flow childwards, through that channel 
first his influence flows, and flows so spontaneously 
that it flows even while it is yet unconscious of it- 
self. His mother is his first disciple — his first Christ- 
ian. Then it is evident, from what the very frag- 
mentary records tell us, that his power found out the 
other open channels which connect a man's life with 
his brothers' lives, and flowed in them. "Neither 
did his brethren believe on him," we read at first, 
as if their unbelief in him was strongest because 
his appeal to them had been the closest and most urg- 
ent. But by-and-by the " Lord's brethren " stand high 
among his disciples, as if when they did believe in 
him their belief was the most natural and real of all. 
Around his cross more than one of the mourners was 
of his kindred. Is it not evident that the great system 
of the universal brotherhood in which all men are 
children of the same Father, was reached by the 



Brotherhood in Christ. 81 

power of the Son of God through the smaller system 
which had its centre in the household of the carpen- 
ter? 

And if we look at Christ's larger method, at the way 
in which his work went on after it had gone beyond 
that earliest stage among his personal kindred, the 
same thing still appears. His truth ran abroad in 
the channels which were made by the natural rela- 
tions of mankind. It was a fulfilment of the method 
of the Old Testament, in which again and again the 
Jew was commanded concerning the words which 
God had spoken unto him: "Thou shalt teach them 
unto thy children." So Jesus makes the father's faith 
a reason for the sick child's restoral to health; so he 
fills the home at Bethany with his pervading pres- 
ence; so he sends the recovered lunatic of Gadara 
back to his home, to spread among his friends the 
story of his healing. So he bids his disciples make 
way for the mothers bringing him their children; so 
he finds in household life an image of the Everlast- 
ing Father's willingness to hear his people's prayer. 
True, he is always recognizing that the ultimate power 
of his religion is individual. He declares that some- 
times, in its assertion of itself, it will break up family 
life and set the son at variance against the father, 
and the daughter against her mother. But all that 
is expressly declared to be unnatural. It is the 
rending of a family life which is not worthy of the 
great influence which it has to transmit. It is the 
bursting of a channel which has grown too weak to 
carry the tides of the religious life. The whole great 



82 Brotherhood in Christ. 

scheme of Christianity, with its family Sacrament of 
Baptism ; with its family conception of the govern- 
ment of God ; with its Table of the Lord ; with its 
graces, which are all transfigurations of the family 
affections ; this Christianity began by using, and has 
always used, the network of natural brotherhood 
which it found enveloping the earth as a means for 
the diffusion of its truth and power. Its Christ is 
no philosopher, dropping seed-thoughts into single 
hearts, thinking only of individual character, or at 
most only of artificial combinations, of states built 
up elaborately and with complicated laws. He is 
the Son of Man, entering into the heart of the hu- 
manity to which he intrinsically belongs, beating 
his truth into its life-blood and making his power 
run in the channels of its primitive affections. 

Jt is not only Christianity, nor only religion, that 
thus makes use of the network of natural relation- 
ship Avith which the earth is covered. Every high- 
er and more spiritual influence, every interest which 
claims more of man than his mere physical appetites, 
avails itself of this same first fact of related human 
life, this fact that no man stands alone, but each is 
bound by some kind of kinship in with all the rest. 
This is the way in which knowledge spreads itself. 
Along the lines which tie the father to the child, and 
the older to the younger brother, runs the commu- 
nication of facts and the contagion of the enthusiasm 
of learning. Taste spreads itself through a family 
circle as the sun spreads its light through an atmos- 
phere where every particle is brother to every other. 



Brotherhood in Christ. 



Patriotism is not a fire which each new citizen has 
to go and light for himself at the central altar of his 
country's principles. It is caught in the warm air of 
loyal homes. It kindles unconsciously where hearts 
lie close together in the first relationships of man. 
Suppose that some new truth came to-day to take 
possession of humanity; suppose that some great 
practical philosophy desired to occupy the world; 
can we imagine for it any practicable way but this, 
that it should spread along these lines which it 
would find already marked out for it, the lines in 
which influence is used to run, the lines which 
God's hands have hollowed from life to life, from soul 
to soul? 

And now if we have seen the principle, let us ask 
ourselves what its results will be. If religion spreads 
itself among mankind along the lines of man's nat- 
ural affections and relationship, the results which we 
may look for will, I think, be two. First, the exalta- 
tion and refinement of those affections and relation- 
ship, themselves; and, second, the simplifying and 
humanizing of religion. 

We all know how the natural relations between 
human creatures all have their downward as well as 
their upward tendency, their animal as well as their 
spiritual side. The lusts of Power and Pride and 
Cruelty and Passion all come in to make foul and 
mean that which ought to be pure and high. What 
is there that can keep the purity and loftiness of 
domestic life ? What is there that can preserve the 
color and glory of the family, like the perpetual con- 



84 Brotherhood in Christ. 

sciousness, running through all the open channels of 
its life, that they are being used to convey the truth 
and power of God ? The father who counts himself 
one link in the ever developing perpetuation of 
truth among mankind, handing on to his children 
what has been already handed down to him; the 
brother who without struggle or effort feels all that 
be believes flowing through this life into the open 
life of the brother by his side; are not these the men 
in whom brotherhood and fatherhood keep their true 
dignity and never grow base, jealous, tawdry or 
tyrannical ? Everything keeps its best nature only 
by being put to its best use. The relations of kin- 
ship are no exception to this rule. It is when, under- 
neath the pleasant courtesies and intimacies of the 
home, there is all the time going on a diffusion and 
distribution of religion, of the highest motives and 
the highest thoughts ; it is then that the home 
beams, even on the surface of its life, with its richest 
beauty. 

And, as the home, pervaded by this diffusion of 
religion, comes to its best beauty, so religion too is 
at its best, when it is flowing through the channels 
which were made for it to run in. Keligion, we 
know, is apt to grow unhuman. Either vaguely 
speculative, or hardly dogmatic, or fantastically 
formal, it loses the fulness and completeness, the 
healthiness and entire vitality which are the con- 
ditions of its best work. And the more solitary you 
make religion, the more it becomes in danger of such 
degenerations. It is in its contact with the healthy 



Brotherhccd in Christ. 85 

relations of human life that religion keeps its own true 
healthiness. It is as .given from the father to the son, 
that religion truly reveals its authority and benefi- 
cence. It is as passing from brother to brother, along 
the channels of their commonest intercourse, that re- 
ligion loses its cloudiness and becomes full of sincer- 
ity, honesty and common sense. Wherever religion 
deserts these primary and perpetual channels and 
becomes monastic, the brooding solitary experience 
of single souls, transmitting itself through the arti- 
ficial relationships of priest and penitent, instead of 
through the normal relationships of life, in every 
such case religion becomes fantastic and diseased. It 
is the tendency of the unnatural associations of man- 
kind to sacrifice the individual to the community. 
It is the privilege of the natural relationships of man, 
at once to secure social life and to foster individual- 
ity. That is the invariable difference between the 
companionship of the cloister and the companionship 
of the family. Religion, as it flows through one, 
grows complicated and unhealthy. Religion flow- 
ing through the other, gains ever new simplicity and 
health. 

I know, my dear friends, well enough, that when I 
talk thus 1 am talking ideally. I am talking of these 
first relations of men to one another as they are when 
they are at their best. They are not always so. And 
when they fail of their best it is always true that 
the very quality in them which made them capable 
of special good, makes them the means of greatest 
evil. I have spoken of the way in which the net- 



86 Brotherhood in Christ. 

work of natural affection, stretched all over the earth, 
may carry everywhere the truth and power of Christ. 
But you know well enough that every channel which 
is made to carry good influence, may be taken pos- 
session of by wickedness and made its instrument. 
The pipes which were laid to bring pure water into 
the city may bring in corruption. The veins which 
ought to run cool with the blood of health may be 
turned into rivers of fire and fever. The great sys- 
tem of popular education which ought to fill the land 
with sound learning, may be itself the means by 
which ignorance and error may be carried into 
countless homes. And so it is with all that other 
system of which I have been speaking. Through the 
same natural affections by which religion ought to be 
spread abroad, it is possible enough that infidelity, and 
vice, and worldliness may get a prevalence which 
they could gain in no other way. What is it that 
perpetuates the blighting influence of fashion ? 
What are the channels through which are spread 
abroad, all over a community, the false standard of 
wealth, the base idea of manliness which poisons 
countless hearts ? Are they not the same God-cre- 
ated channels through which the holiest influences 
were meant to flow ? " Simon, called Peter, and An- 
drew his brother; James, the son of Zebedee, and 
John his brother." Many and many a time their 
brotherhood is the power of a common curse, instead 
of a common blessing. Many and many a home there 
is to-day where fatherhood and childhood, brother- 
hood and sisterhood, the self same channels still 



Brotherhood in Christ. 87 

through which God meant that truth and righteous- 
ness should flow, are bearing pollution to innocent 
hearts, and temptation to weak hearts, and discour- 
agement to sad hearts; pain instead of joy, hopeless- 
ness instead of hope. 

I know all this. Who can live in the midst of this 
network of brotherhood and not know it ? But yet 
all this misuse and perversion of the principle only 
makes the principle more plain. Every sight of cor- 
ruption running freely through the channels which 
connect life with life, only shows how open those 
channels are, and makes an earnest man more 
anxious to rescue them for their best use. 

What shall we do then ? What shall you do, who 
feel with every breath you draw how other lives are 
living in open communication with yours, how their 
very life-bloods flow together in one common system? 
What shall you do, who are anxious that what is best 
in each should come to all the rest; that you should 
be able to give to your brethren the faith which is 
so strong in your own heart, and get from them the 
faith by which they live ? What shall yuu parents 
do, who want to make your children love the Lord 
you love ? What shall you brothers do, who want to 
make your brothers know the truth you know? 
What can you do to make the channels of your fam- 
ily life and of your natural relationship to one an- 
other, carry the influences which you want to give, 
and bring back to you the influences which you want 
to receive ? It is not hard to tell, although it may be 
very hard to do. First, you can try to keep the 



88 Brotherhood in Christ 

whole character of your intercourses fine, and pure, 
and high. Look into countless families that you 
know — perhaps if I dared I might even bid some of 
you look into your own — and ask yourself whether, 
supposing some one member of that family to be truly 
religious, the atmosphere of the home is lofty enough 
and pare enough to furnish the proper medium by 
which that one member's religion may freely pass in- 
to the lives of all rest. Fire will leap through heated 
air; and the most deep of all emotions, the most eager 
of all desires, the emotion of the love of God, the de- 
sire to serve and know Christ, will pass most readily 
from heart to heart where all emotion is pure and 
lofty, and where all desire is unselfish and enthusias- 
tic. But in homes where all the air is full of selfish- 
ness, where the whole tone is sordid, where every 
member is jealously watching that no other gets ad- 
vantage over him, where brotherhood means suspic- 
ion, and fatherhood petty tyranny, and childhood 
restless impatience to be free, what chance is there 
for the divine fire of the higher life to leap through a 
heavy atmosphere like that ? "I have been a Chris- 
tian all these years; and look at my children — not 
one Christian among them all ;" so the perplexed, dis- 
appointed father or mother talks. But when you open 
the door of that household's history, you feel the rea- 
son of the failure in an instant. As the door opens 
there comes pouring out on you a turbid wrangle of 
family quarrels, or a chatter of perpetual frivolity, 
or perhaps, what perhaps is worst of all, a great, dull, 
heavy cloud of well-fed stupidity, and ignorance, and 



Brotherhood in Christ. 89 

mental stagnation, which is all that family life within 
those walls has ever meant. Through such a dark- 
ness as that, what wonder that the little candle-light 
of the father's or the mothers piety, weak enough it- 
self, has never had the strength to pierce. No ! The 
first thing to be done, in order that the natural rela- 
tionships may be made the channel for religious in- 
fluence, is that they should be kept pure with unsel- 
fishness, and open with intelligence, and fine with 
sympathy. Then when any religious influence seeks 
to pass from life to life, it will find already built a 
channel that is worthy of it and fit to carry it. 

But there is something more definite than that. 
It is a very wide law and a very beautiful one, that 
the best way to make a thing fit for the use for which 
it was first made is to put it to that use. The best 
way to make the dusty trumpet clear is to blow mu- 
sic through it. The best way to make the sluggish 
mind capable of thinking is to think with it. And 
so the best way to make the natural relationships ca- 
pable of carrying religious influence is to give them 
religious influences to carry, so strong and ardent 
that they shall force and burn their own way through 
whatever artificial obstructions may have stopped up 
the channel through which they were meant to go. 
Again I hear a Christian parent complaining that his 
religion has not told upon his children to make them 
Christians ; but, when I ask, I find that there never has 
been one direct effort to make it tell ; never, in all the 
years while they have lived together, one word or 
act, which definitely and specifically, tried to send the 



90 Brotherhood in Christ 

father's religion through the open channel that was 
between them, from the father's life into the child's. 
Everything else, every other truth and interest and 
treasure, has been offered and urged over and over 
again, but not one word or act has ever urged or even 
offered religion. 

I know what will be said at once, and I think I 
understand it. I know how often it is hardest to 
speak about the most sacred things to those who are 
the nearest and the dearest to us. I understand 
that shrinking which keeps the brother's lips closed 
from urging on his own brother the truth and the per- 
suasion which he will urge freely enough on any other 
man. The glib and ready Sunday-school teacher 
goes from his class to his home, and in the presence 
of his own children he is silent as a stone. In that 
phenomenon, which is so familiar and often so per- 
plexing, I think we can see the mixture of two feel- 
ings, one of which is bad, the other good. The bad 
feeling is the sense of shame which comes when we 
think of pressing the love of God and the service of 
Christ upon the minds and consciences of those who 
are always living with us, and who know what poor, 
weak, wicked and unfaithful things our own lives are. 
The good reason for our silence is more subtle. 
It is, I think, the feeling which comes to us almost 
everywhere, but comes to us most strongly in 
the presence of those whose hearts lie nearest to 
our own, that for the conveyance of the most sacred 
influences words are the most clumsy and unsatis- 
factory of means; that life is tho only testimony by 



Brotherhood in Christ. 91 

which the power of Christ in one man's heart can 
thoroughly bear its witness to the heart of any other 
man. It is natural enough that this consciousness 
should be most clear and strong just where the pos- 
sibility of heart bearing direct testimony to heart 
becomes most evident, in the home where hearts 
ought to lie nearest and openest to one another. I 
know how these two reasons, and perhaps some 
others, make it very hard sometimes for the father 
to talk to his child, or for the brother to talk to his 
brother, about the most sacred things. And yet I 
know how often just one word is needed to break 
through the obstruction and reserve, and let all the 
wealth of God's grace which has been gathering in 
one humbly consecrated heart, pour forth into 
another which is waiting empty and hungry all the 
time. At least we are all bound to be sure that it is 
something nobler than mere pride or shame that is 
keeping us from saying to our brother what may be 
his word of life. 

But, after all, the word is only one method; the 
simplest, the most immediate, the most natural, but 
not the only nor the richest method by which men 
send influence forth to their brethren. If, honestly, 
the urgent word does not seem to be the true way 
to reach the lives which God has set the closest to 
our own, the truth remains that he who really seeks 
to send abroad the Gospel, and who lives that Gospel 
in the centre of some one of the networks of brother- 
hood with which God has covered the earth, and 
who cares for other souls beside his own, and 



92 Brotherhood in Christ 



is on the watch for every feather with which the 
arrow of his influence can possibly be winged, will 
surely find the ways he seeks, however impossible it 
is to tell before what they will be ; and cannot fail to 
discover at last that God has biessed through him 
the lives which are no less dear to him than his 
own. 

With that assurance, full of responsibility and full 
also of encouraging hope, I leave the truth which I 
have tried to preach to you. Go to your homes and 
question them ! Zebedee ! mother of Zebedee's 
children ! ask yourselves whether your household is 
kept open by pure, refined, unselfish, elevated liv- 
ing, by a continual sense of God, by ever present 
prayer, so that the best of light and strength which 
God has given to any one tends freely to become the 
strength and light of all. Why are John and James 
so often not together in the company of Christ? 
What does it mean that so often Simon Peter lingers 
in darkness, while Andrew is in the full sunshine of 
the Master's service ? Go home and question your 
household life about these things, and claim for your 
home that blessing for which God made our homes; 
the blessing of persuasive grace; the blessing of a 
brotherhood and sisterhood in the divine life, ever 
echoing and fulfilling the brotherhoods and sister- 
hoods which make the richness and beauty of our 
human living; and ever picturing and anticipating 
the perfect brotherhoods and sisterhoods in the great 
world-family of God. 



SERMON VI. 

me (Stat with m« monmltA Serf. 

" And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between 
thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt 
bruise his heel." — Genesis iii. 15. 

THE scene in the story of which these words are 
written is fixed deep in the imagination of man- 
kind. We read it in our childhood, and it is never 
afterwards forgotten. As we go on, seeing more 
and more of life, life and this story of the Book of 
Genesis become mutually commentaries on each 
other. Life throws light on the story and the story 
throws light on life. 

Let us take one passage from the story now, and 
try to hold it in the light of life and see its meaning 
brighten and deepen. God is represented as talking 
to the serpent who has been the tempter of man- 
kind. The serpent, the spirit of Evil, has forced 
his way into the human drama. He has compelled 
the man and woman to admit him to their company. 
He cannot now be cast out by one summary act. 
He has come, and he remains. All that takes place 

in human history takes place in his presence. Upon 

93 



94 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

everything he tries to exercise his influence. He is 
everywhere and always, and always and everywhere 
the same. 

To this serpent, this spirit of evil in the world, 
God is speaking. What is it that he says ? He 
might tell the monster that the world belonged to him. 
" Since man has let you in, he must abide the issue. 
He is yours. There is no help for it, and you must 
do with him as you will." On the other hand he 
might with one sweep of his omnipotence bid the 
hateful reptile depart. " Begone ; for man belongs 
to me; and even if he has given himself to yon, you 
can have no power over him at all, for he is mine.'' 
The words which are written in our text are different 
from both of these. What does God say ? There 
shall be a long, terrible fight between man and the 
power of evil. The power of evil shall haunt and 
persecute man, cripple him and vex him, hinder 
him and make him suffer. It shall bruise his heel. 
But man shall ultimately be stronger than the power 
of evil, and shall overcome it and go forth victorious, 
though bruised and hurt, and needing recovery and 
rest. He shall bruise its head. 

Is there not in these words which the awful voice 
of God is heard speaking at the beginning of 
human history, a most clear and intelligible pro- 
phecy of human life ? It separates itself at once from 
the crude theories which men have made on either 
side. It is not reckless pessimism nor reckless 
optimism. It is God's broad, wise, long-sighted pro- 
phecy of man, harassed, distressed and wounded on 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 95 

the way, but yet in spite of wounds and hindrances 
finally getting the better of his enemy and coming 
to success. With that promise of God — promise 
and warning together — sounding in his ears, man 
started on the long journey of existence, and has 
come thus far upon his way. 

"We want to ask ourselves how far that prophecy 
has been fulfilled, how far it has justified itself in 
history. We grow all out of patience with men's 
crude and sweeping and unqualified epitomes of life. 
One man says " It is all good," and will see none of 
the evil and sin and misery which are everywhere. 
Another man says " It is all bad;" and for him all the 
brightness and graciousness and perpetual progress 
go for nothing. One man calls humanity a hopeless 
brute. Another man calls humanity a triumphant 
angel. God in these words of Genesis says," .Neither ! 
but a wounded, bruised, strong creature, not running 
and leaping and shouting, often crawling and creep- 
ing in its pain, but yet brave, with an inextinguish- 
able certainty of ultimate success, fighting a battle 
which is full of pain but is not desperate, sure ultimate- 
ly to set his heel upon his adversary's head." Cer- 
tainly there is a picture of man there which, in its 
most general statement, corresponds largely with the 
picture which history draws, and with that which 
our own experience presents. Let us look a little 
while first, at the truthfulness of the picture ; then 
at the way in which it comes to be true, and then 
at the sort of life which it will make in men who 
recognize its truth. The fact, the reason, and the 



96 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

consequence. Those are the natural divisions of any 
subject. Let them be the divisions of ours. 

I look first at the institutions which mankind has 
formed for doing bis work in the world. Institutions 
are nothing but colossal men. They are the great 
aggregations of humanity for doing those universal 
works which it is the interest not merely of this man, 
or of that man, but of all men to have done. Church 
institutions, state institutions, present the workings 
of human nature on a large scale, and so give excel- 
lent opportunity to study the fundamental facts of hu- 
man life. And when we look at the great institutions 
of the world, what do we see ? Everywhere, whether 
it be in Church or state, essentially the same thing. 
Noble principles, vast, beneficent agencies, grad- 
ually conquering barbarism and misery, making men 
better, making men happier, but always miserably 
hampered by wretched little sins of administration ; 
stung in the heel by the serpents of selfishness, and 
sordidness, and insincerity and narrowness. Civil- 
ization, which is simply the sum of all the institu- 
tions which are shaped out of the best aspirations of 
mankind — it is simply amazing when we tell over 
to ourselves what the powers are which keep civili- 
zation to-day from putting its heel square and fs.ir 
upon the head of barbarism, and finishing it forever. 
Popular government perverted by demagogues ; Com- 
merce degraded by the intrusion of fraud ; the Church 
always weakened by hypocrisy; Charity perplexed 
by the fear of imposture and the dread of pauperism. 
Why, is not the image of institutionalism, embody- 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 97 

iug great principles, full of the consciousness of 
great ideas, and yet hindered and halting everywhere 
through the blunders and weaknesses of its admin- 
istration — is it not just the picture of the giant with 
the bruised heel, the great strong creature, limping 
dubiously along the road over which he ought to be 
moving majestically to assured results ? 

Look again at society — that great mother and mis- 
tress of the thoughts and lives of so many of our old 
and younger people. It has its devotees and its de- 
nouncers. How few of us have ever seriously set our- 
selves to ask what is the real value and meaning of that 
social life which occupies so large a portion of the 
activity of civilized humanity? In its idea it is 
beautiful. Eagerness to take pleasure in the com- 
pany of fellow-men — eagerness to give pleasure, by 
whatever contribution we can make — a wish to share 
with others all their gifts and ours — these are most 
true and healthy impulses. The society which is in- 
stinct with these impulses is the enemy of solitude; 
it puts its foot on selfishness ; it makes men brothers; 
it kills out morbidness and self-conceit. Society is 
doing this — " What ! our society ?" you say, " this 
false, and foolish, and corrupt, and selfish, and frivol- 
ous uproar which takes possession of our city every 
winter, and runs its round of excitement, and jeal- 
ousy, and dissipation, until Lent sets in ?" Yes, even 
that ! Sorely bruised in the heel it is, wounded and 
crippled in a melancholy fashion ; a poor enough 
image of that divine communion of the children of 

God, which is the real society of men and women — 

7 



98 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

but yet a thing to be cured and cleansed, not to be 
cast away, not a thing for any man to turn his back 
upon and be a misanthrope, but for all men and wo- 
men to do what they can to rescue and to fill with 
the spirit of a nobler life. 

Then, think again of learning. We have a per- 
fect right to indulge our enthusiasm over man as 
a studying and learning creature. Man seeking after 
knowledge is felt at once to be man using very noble 
powers. It is man doing the work for which a very 
noble part of him was made. We think of the ready 
and cheerful self-sacrifice of the scholars, great and 
little, not merely of those who have been rewarded 
for the surrenders which they made by the applause 
of a delighted world, but of the scholars whose self- 
sacrifice has lain in obscurity, who have eaten their 
crusts in silence, and not even recompensed them- 
selves with groans. We think of all that man's un- 
tiring pursuit of knowledge has attained ; of the 
great conquests which have been rescued out of the 
kingdom of ignorance. We let our imagination run 
forward and picture in delighted bewilderment the 
future triumphs of the same divine audacity, man's 
brave determination to know all that is knowable. 
And then, ivhile we are glowing with this large en- 
thusiasm, what is this which comes to interrupt and 
chill it ? What are these petty jealousies and hates 
of learned men ? What is this pedantry? What is 
this narrowness which neglects and despises, and 
even tries to hinder other learning than its own? 
Close on the large ambition comes the miserable 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 99 

discontent, the carping criticism, the discourage- 
ment, the love of darkness. The worm is in the 
wood of the brave ship that sails so proudly out to 
sea. The rust is on the arrow which is sent flying 
through the air. What is the Poet's complaint, that 
"knowledge comes but wisdom lingers,'' except a 
declaration that here too the full completeness of a 
great process is prevented, the serpent is stinging at 
the heel which ultimately must be set upon the 
serpent's head and crush it. 

And what shall we say about religion ? The 
future of mankind is a religious future. It is man 
as religious, that is to rule the world. What changes 
of form religious thought may undergo, who can 
pretend to say ? But that religion shall perish, none 
of us believes. And if religion continues, she must 
reign. We cannot imagine for her a merely subor- 
dinate or passive life. She must reign, reign till she 
has put all enemies under her feet. Indeed I do not 
know how any man can really believe in religion to- 
day, who does not believe in the destiny of religion to 
be the mistress of the world. I cannot believe in God 
without believing that he is the rightful Lord of every- 
thing; for that is what "God" means. A God who 
is not rightful Lord and Master, is not God. We say 
this with entire certainty, and then, we look up to see 
religion conquering the world. We do see what we 
look lor. But we see something else besides. How 
the great conqueror is harassed and tormented. 
What petty annoyances and trouble, she is beset 
with. Look at the crudeness, and the mercenariness. 



ioo The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

and mechanicalness with which men, even her own 
friends, misconceive her most spiritual truths. Look 
how her theories break down in human action. 
Behold the hypocrisy, the selfishness, the bigotry, 
the fanaticism, the untruthfulness, the formality, 
the cowardice, the meanness of religious people! 
Wounded in the house of her friends, is this great 
majestic Being who is some day to rule and save the 
world. And outside of her friends, among her en- 
emies, men insult her and oppose her as if she were 
their worst foe, and not, what she really is, their only 
hope. The work which she is bound to do will none 
the less be done, but it will be done under perpetual 
opposition and persecution, done with torn and 
bleeding hands and feet. 

Thus hurriedly I think over the great powers 
which are helping the world, and everywhere the 
case concerning all of them seems to be the same. 
All of them are doing good work. All of them are 
destined to ultimate success. Of none of them do 
we despair. But every one of them is working 
against hindrance and enmity and opposition. Not 
one of them goes freely and fearlessly to its victory. 
It is the combination of these two facts that gives 
the color and the tone to human history. From 
every century comes forth the same report. Great 
powers, sure to succeed, yet ever hindered at their 
work; never abandoning hope, yet moving timidly 
because they know, that sure as their final victory 
may be, their immediate lot is wounds and insult. 
Is it not exactly the old prophecy. The serpent 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 101 

whose head is ultimately to be crushed, now ever 
wounding the heel which is finally to be its destruc- 
tion. Could any image picture human history so 
well? 

Turn now away from this large look across the 
fields of history, and think how true the picture of 
the Book of Genesis is to our personal life. I might 
open the closed and sacred pages of any man's ex- 
perience. Here is a man who for his thirty, forty, 
fifty years has been seeking after goodness, trying 
to conquer his passions and vices, and be a really 
good man. What will he say of his struggle as he 
looks back upon it ? Let him stand upon this Sunday 
hillock, a little nearer to the sky perhaps than on 
the week-days; let him stand here and say how life 
looks to him as his eye runs back. You know the 
hindrances you have met. Paul's story has been 
your story. When you would do good evil was 
present with you. You never sprang most bravely 
from the low ordinary level of your living, that a 
hand did not seem to catch you and draw you back. 
You never felt a new power start up within you 
that a new weakness did not start up by its side. 
Terrible has been this quickness of the evil power, 
giving you the awful sense of being watched and 
dogged. Awful has grown this certainty that no 
good impulse ever could go straight and uninter- 
rupted to its victorious result, and yet, is it not won- 
derful how you have kept the assurance that good and 
not evil is the true master-power of your life ! The 
resolution has been broken. It has been wounded. 



102 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

It has limped and halted. It has stood for months, 
perhaps for years, in the same place and made no 
progress, but it has never died. There is no man 
here who has not failed ; but is there any man here 
in all this multitude who has given up ? Not one ! 
Every man here, when he looks forward, means some 
day to enter into the gates of salvation, to leave his 
sins behind him and live the life of God. In such a 
hope, in the light of such a resolution only, is life 
tolerable. Everything that hinders and delays that 
resolution is an accident and an intruder. The res- 
olution itself is the utterance of God's purpose for 
the life. 

I think the same is true about our faith. To be- 
lieve is the true glory of existence. To disbelieve is 
to give ourselves into the power of death, and, just so 
far, to cease from living. And you are living and 
not dead. You do believe. You are quite sure of 
spiritual verities. God is a truth to you. Your soul 
is your true self. Christ, the spiritual perfectness of 
manhood, the true Son of God, is really King of the 
world. This spiritual faith you would not part with 
for your life. It is your only hope. You look for- 
ward to the day when it shall have conquered and 
cast out every doubt in you, and reign supreme. But 
now, how doubt besets you ! Now, how a denial 
comes like its shadow on the heels of every faith ! 
Who is this man whom in your loftier and more 
hopeful moments you discern, far off, on some bright 
distant day, entering into the open portals of a per- 
fect faith, and leaving doubt dead outside the door 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 103 

forever? Is be the victor of an easy fight? Does 
he come springing up the shining steps with muscles 
only just tried enough to feel themselves elastic 
from the Jong struggle ? Indeed, not so ! The man 
—yourself- — whom you see finally victorious, comes 
crawling to the temple of entire faitL, dragging 
after him the wounded heel which Doubt, for long 
years before at last he died, stung, and stung, and 
stung again. Wonderful is that faith in faith, a 
thing to be thankful for to all eternity; wonderful 
is that faith in faith by which the soul dares to be 
sure, even in the very thick of doubt, that in belief, 
and not in unbelief, is its eternal rest and home. 

I have spoken of the prophecy of Genesis as if it 
referred to that total seed of the woman which is all 
humanity. I have no doubt that it does so refer. 
But it has also always been considered to have refer- 
ence to that special representative humanity which 
was in Jesus Christ. To him it certainly applies. What 
is the story of that wondrous life which, centuries 
afterward, Christ lived in Palestine ? It is the story 
of a life wounded again and again by an antagonist 
whom at the last it overthrew. Christ's victory was 
perfect on the cross. There, finally, he conquered the 
world, he conquered sin. There he went up upon his 
throne, and Sin and Death were under his feet. 
But how did he come to that throne? Behold him 
staggering, wounded, bruised, beaten, all the way 
from Pilate's brutal judgment hall to Calvary. 
Remember what the years before had been. All the 
time he had been conquering the world and sin, and 



104 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

yet all the time sin and the world had been appar 
ently conquering him. At the tomb door of Beth- 
any, he stands and groans and weeps. Death has 
cut deep into his affections. His friend is dead. 
We may well believe that he hesitates and almost 
doubts. Then he lifts up his head and cries, 
"Lazarus, come forth !" and as the dead man comes 
to life, is it not true in that moment that the bruised 
heel of the woman is set upon the head of the ser- 
pent which has bruised it? Is not the old prophecy 
of Genesis, in that moment, perfectly fulfilled ? 

May I not then rest here my statement and asser- 
tion of the fact ? Is it not true that everywhere the 
good is hampered and beset and wounded by the 
evil which it is ultimately to slay; true also that the 
good will ultimately slay the evil by which it was 
wounded and beset ? These two facts, in their com- 
bination, make a philosophy of life which, when one 
has accepted it, colors each thought he thinks, each 
act he does. The two facts subtly blend their influ- 
ence in every experience. They make impossible 
either crude pessimism or crude optimism. No 
man can curse that world in which the best of men, 
and the best of manhood, is steadily moving onward 
to the victory over the serpent. No man can un- 
qualifiedly praise the world where that onward move- 
ment of the best is always being wounded and re- 
tarded by the serpent, over which it is to triumph at 
the last. But surely it gives certainty to our own 
observation of the history of man ; surely it gives 
dignity to what has seemed to be the mere accident 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 105 

of confusion in our own lives, when we find them 
both prophesied on the first page of the world's 
Book. Yes, that which puzzles you or me, that 
which so often seems to make life meaningless and 
cruel, at least it is no chance and thoughtlessness 
by which it comes, for it is written in the very pro- 
spectus and prophecy of human life. 

It would be possible, 1 think, also to show that it 
is written, or at least the possibility of it is written 
in the very necessity of things. On that I must not 
linger. I have dwelt so long upon the fact, that I 
must say but a few words of the cause and the con- 
sequence. 

Of the cause I may say only this, that there is 
one conceivable state of things which in its opera- 
tion must produce just that phenomenon which we 
have been studying at such length this morning. 
That state of things is a vast general purpose for 
the best good of mankind, submitted for its execution 
to the wills of men. Granted a God who means all 
good for his creatures, and who, as a part of his 
benevolent designs for them, calls their free agency to 
help in bringing about his purposes, and what shall 
we behold ? Indubitable evidences that the good is 
stronger than the evil ; a great, slow, steady pro- 
gress of the good, forever gaining on the evil ; and all 
the time reactions and detractions, rebellions of the 
evil against its conquest by the good. A stream 
with grand majestic onward flow, whose broad 
strong bosom is not smooth, but flecked all over 
with eddies, little twists and turns, in which the 



io6 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

water for a time is running the wrong way. A stately 
figure of humanity, slowly pressing clown its heel 
upon the serpent's head, yet with its face full of dis- 
turbance and of pain, because the serpent on whose 
head the heel is sot is always stinging with the very 
venom of despair the heel that crushes it. 

Tell me, my friends, if this is what would come if 
there were a great divine purpose in the world ne- 
cessarily submitted for its execution to the will of 
man: then, since this has come, since this is the very 
picture which our eyes behold, shall we not let our- 
selves believe that the cause which I have de- 
scribed does indeed lie behind this wonderfully inte- 
resting, pathetic, fearful, hopeful life we live? A 
great divine purpose, dependent for its detailed ex- 
ecution on the will of men ! Let me believe that, and 
then I know what means this ineradicable hope and 
this perpetual discouragement. Let me know that, 
and then I understand both why the good does not 
conquer now, and why the good must conquer at 
the last. 

Our last question still remains. What sort of 
human life will this world tend to make in the 
mean time, or what will be the truest and most fitting 
life to live in a world such as this which we have 
seen our world to be. For man is capable of many 
lives, and is able to answer to the world in which he 
lives with its appropriate response. 

Two qualities, I think, must certainly appear in 
the man who has thoroughly caught the spirit and 
is susceptible to the best influences of this world. 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 107 

One quality I call watchful hope, and the other I 
call anxious charity. We need our adjectives as 
well as our nouns when we describe the true temper 
in which a man must live. The nouns describe the 
fundamental confidence which must arise from the 
conviction of a divine purpose for the Jife of man. 
The adjectives depict the sense of danger which 
comes from the knowledge that this divine purpose 
is committed for its execution to the unstable wills 
of men. Hope and charity, these must both spring 
up from the soul of faith. If God has truly a pur- 
pose for our lives, who dare be hopeless ? If God 
has really a purpose for our brother's life, who dare 
despair of him? Ah, we do only half believe it. 
Therefore our hope is such a colorless and feeble 
thing ; therefore our charity so doubts and hesitates. 
But they are in us still. They must be in us just in 
proportion to our faith in God. 

And yet the hope must be a watchful hope, the 
charity must be an anxious charity. Neither can 
fling itself out broadcast and without reserve. Hope 
is aware of danger ; charity is full of fear; in this 
world where God has done all God can, and yet 
leaves the last decisiou of his own destiny in the 
hands of man. 

A watchful hope ! An anxious charity ! Are not 
these very clear and recognizable qualities ? Do 
they not make a very clear and recognizable charac- 
ter ? They make a character which has stamped the 
life of humanity wherever it has really known and 
felt the conditions of its life. 



108 The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 

I One sometimes thinks how it would be if to each 
star which floats in space the life which its inhab- 
itants are living should impart a color, which other 
stars might see as they pass by it in the never rest- 
ing chorus of the planets. \ Can we not picture to 
ourselves with what a special hue the long spiritual 
experience of the men who live upon it must have 
clothed this earth of ours? A sober glory, a radiance 
of indescribable depth and richness ; and yet a cer- 
tain tremulousness as of a perpetual fear ; no outburst 
of unquestioning, unhesitating splendor, but a re- 
strained effulgence, hoping for more than it dare 
yet to claim, pathetic with a constant, age-long dis- 
content. 

Whether our sister stars discover it or not, we 
know it well; we who live here and see the highest 
typical life of man upon the earth. Do we not know 
how all the best and holiest men live in a hope so 
great that its own greatness clothes it in a mystery 
which is almost doubt, as the sun clothes itself in 
sunlight which is almost a hiding of the splendor it 
displays. We cannot describe it to ourselves or one 
another, but how well we know it; that watchful hope 
and anxious charity; that sober, earnest, cheerful, 
and careful richness which have filled the lives and 
shone out of the faces of the best men the world has 
seen, and given its profoundest meaning to the name 
of Man ! 

When we look up to Christ and catch the color of 
His wondrous life, is there not there the confirmation 
and supreme exemplification of all this? In him are 



The Giant with the Wounded Heel. 109 

watchful hope and anxious charity complete. This 
story of his life is no wild shout, flung forth out of 
the cloudless sky, but a rich, solemn, deep, beautiful 
music, wherein the sense of danger always trembles 
and sways beneath the constancy of an unalterable 
certainty of God. 

If we are saved by Christ, it will be into the life 
of Christ that we are saved, into the inextinguisha- 
ble hope and into the watchful fear together. Not 
intoxicated by the hope and not discouraged by the 
fear, we shall go on our way expecting both parts 
of the old prophecy to be fulfilled in us, as they were 
both fulfilled in Him. Expecting to be stung and 
bruised by the serpent, but sure ultimately, if we let 
God give us all His strength, to set the bruised and 
stung heel on the serpent's head. That life may we 
all have the grace to live. 



SERMON VII. 

%\\t &m $i (Mm mmgM with $ixt. 

"And I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fire, and them that 
had gotten the victory over the beast" . . . stand on the sea 
of glass, having the " harps of God." — Revelation xt. 2. 

WITH all the mysteriousness of the Book of the 
Kevelation, one thing we are sure of; that in 
it we have the summing up of the moral processes of 
all time. There may or may not be a more special 
meaning discoverable in its pictures, but this there 
certainly is. Many people find great pleasure in 
tracing out elaborate analogies between its pro- 
phecies and certain particular events in the world's 
career. " Here," they cry, pointing to some particu- 
lar event of contemporary history, " do you not see 
that this is what these chapters mean ?" — " Yes," we 
may generally answer, "they very possibly do mean 
that, but they mean so much besides that. They 
mean that, and all other events in which the same 
universal and eternal causes were at work. These 
special examples fall in under them, but do not cer- 
tainly exhaust their application. They are much 
larger and include much more. They take in the 

whole circle of great spiritual and moral principles." 
110 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 1 

In this way I look at, and shall ask you this after- 
noon to study with me, the verse which is our text. 
I take it to represent, in a highly figurative way, the 
result of all moral contest. We may call that our 
subject. 

It surely is no unimportant one. It is a subject 
that ought to touch all of us very closely, to waken 
our interest and deep anxiety. I am not to speak to 
you of imaginary or unreal conditions, not of un- 
heard of depths of sin, or unimagined heights of holy 
rapture, but only of moral contest, of this struggle 
with suffering and wickedness, of trial, of that state 
which every earnest man who is conscious of his own 
inner life at all knows full well. What is to be the 
end of it all ? How is it all coming out ? These are 
the questions for which I find some suggestion of an 
answer in the pictorial prophecy of St. John. 

They who had gotten the victory over the Beast 
stood on a sea of glass, mingled with fire. What is 
the meaning of this imagery ? I confess that I do 
not pretend to know in full what is intended in the 
Kevelation by this term " The Beast." But on the 
principle which I just stated, I think it certainly 
means in its largest sense the whole power of evil 
in all its earthly manifestations ; everything that 
tempts the soul of man to sin or tries his constancy 
with suffering. Others assert more personal mean- 
ings for the name. One very large school says that 
it means the Church of Rome ; another set of com- 
mentators used to make " the Beast " to be Napoleon 
the Third. Perhaps the name may well include them 



ii2 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 

both, in so far as both stand for badness and mischief 
in the world ; but for our present purpose at least, 
it will be well not to meddle with any of that sort 
of partial, precarious interpretation, but to hold what 
certainly is true, that " the Beast," in its largest sense, 
means all that is beastly, all that is low and base and 
tries to drag down what is high and noble; all sin 
and temptation; and so that "they who have gotten 
the victory over the Beast," are they who have come 
out of sin holy, and out of trial pure, and out of 
much tribulation have entered into the kingdom of 
heaven. 

These are to walk upon "a sea of glass, mingled 
with fire." What does that imagery mean ? The 
sea of glass, the glassy sea, with its smooth transpa- 
rency settled into solid stillness without a ripple or 
the possibility of a storm, calm, clear, placid — evident- 
ly that is the type of repose, of rest, of peace. And 
fire, with its quick, eager, searching nature, testing 
all things, consuming what is evil, purifying what 
is good, never resting a moment, never sparing pain ; 
fire, all through the Bible, is the type of active trial 
of every sort, of struggle. " The fire shall try every 
man's work of what sort it is." " The sea of glass," 
then, " mingled with fire," is repose mingled with 
struggle. It is peace and rest and achievement, with 
the power of trial and suffering yet alive and work- 
ing within it. It is calmness still pervaded by the 
discipline through which it has been reached. 

This is our doctrine — the permanent value of trial 
— that when a man conquers his adversaries and his 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 3 

difficulties, it is not as if he never had encountered 
them. Their power, still kept, is in all his future life. 
They are not only events in his past history, they 
are elements in all his present character. His victory 
is colored with the hard struggle that won it. His 
sea of glass is always mingled with fire, just as this 
peaceful crust of the earth on which we live, with its 
wheat fields, and vineyards, and orchards, and flower- 
beds, is full still of the power of the convulsion that 
wrought it into its present shape, of the floods and vol- 
canoes and glaciers which have rent it, or drowned it, 
or tortured it. Just as the whole fruitful earth, deep 
in its heart, is still mingled with the ever-burning 
fire that is working out its chemical fitness for its 
work, just so the life that has been overturned and 
overturned by the strong hand of God, filled with 
the deep revolutionary forces of suffering, purified 
by the strong fires of temptation, keeps its long dis- 
cipline forever, roots in that discipline the deepest 
growths of the most sunny and luxuriant spiritual 
life that it is ever able to attain. 

How wide this doctrine is. The health of the 
grown man is something different from the health 
of the little child, because it has been reached through 
so many strains and tests and dangers. His strong 
body carries within it not only the record, but the 
power of all that it has passed through. His bones 
are strong by every tug and wrench and burden they 
have borne. His pulse beats even and true with the 
steady purposeful power which it has learned from 
many a period of feverish excitement. His blood 
8 



1 1 4 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 

flows cool, his eye is clear with the simple and 
healthy action which they have gathered out of many 
a time of danger that has come since the rosy untried 
health of babyhood. He is stronger by the accu- 
mulated strength of trial. His sea of glass is mingled 
with fire. 

So take the strong man who has won a large proper- 
ty through many disappointments and reverses, and 
compare him with the baby of fortune who has just 
dropped by inheritance into money which he never 
earned. Compare the rich fathers who have made 
the fortunes with the rich sons who spend them. 
Is there no keener and more intelligent sense of the 
value of money in one than in the other ? Sometimes 
indeed the sense is only keener and not more intelli- 
gent. Sometimes the father is a miser, while the 
son is a pattern of judicious liberality. These differ- 
ences are personal ; but always, either for good or bad, 
the old contest, the long, hard days of patience, the 
courage, the perseverance which earned the fortune 
color its whole possession and use. The repose of old 
age is full of the character that came from the early 
struggle. The sea of glass is mingled with fire. 

Or shall we take the man whose life has known 
bereavement, who has passed sometime through 
those days and nights which I may not try to de- 
scribe to you, but which come up to so many of you as 
I say the old word, death ? Days and nights when he 
watched the slow untwisting of some silver cord on 
which his very life was hung, or suddenly felt the 
golden bowl dashed down and broken of which Ids 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 5 

very life had drank. The first shock became dulled. 
The first agony grew calm. The lips subsided into 
serenity. But was there not something in him that 
made him greater and purer and richer than of old; 
something that let any one see who watched the 
change, that it was u better to have loved and lost 
than never to have loved at all/' A whole new qual- 
ity, that rich quality which the Bible calls by its 
large word "patience," the power of his trial, was in 
his new serenity, until he died. His sea of glass was 
always mingled with fire. 

So it is with the world ; so it is with nations. A 
people that has fought for its life, that has had its 
institutions and ideas subjected to the fiery ordeal, 
can never be again what it has been. It is not sim- 
ply older by so many years, but deeper and truer by 
so much suffering. Besides the mere value which 
men learn to put into what they have had to fight 
for, however worthless it may be in itself, the nation 
that has been saved by struggle, if it has faith 
enough to believe that it was really saved by strug- 
gle and not by accident, by the strength of its ideas 
and not by the chance turning of the weathercock 
of battle, must always, in whatever times of peace 
may follow, deal with its ideas with greater rever- 
ence for the strength that has come out of them in 
war. Under its safest security it will always want 
to feel still the capacity for the same vigorous self- 
defence if it should ever again be needed. Thus its 
sea of glass will always be mingled with fire. 

These are all illustrations of our doctrine. But 



1 1 6 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 

the trouble will be that, however much we recog- 
nize the general rule, the exceptions to it, the varia- 
tions in the effect of trial upon character, will be so 
numerous as to perplex us. We meet with so many 
people whose character seems not to be elevated or 
fired, but depressed and smothered by suffering. 
They come out of adversity apparently with a great 
loss of what was noblest and most attractive in them 
before. Men who were smooth and gracious in 
health, become rough and peevish in sickness. Men 
who were cordial and liberal in wealth, turn proud 
and reserved and close aspoverty overtakes them. If 
trial kindles and stirs up some sluggish natures, on the 
other hand it quenches and subdues many vigorous 
and ardent hearts and sends them crushed and self- 
distrustful to their graves. It seems sometimes as 
if trouble, trial, suffering were in the world like the 
old fabulous river in Epirus of which the legend ran 
that its wonderful waters kindled every unlighted 
torch that was dipped into them, and quenched 
every torch that was lighted. 

But however much difficulty this may give us in 
single cases, it falls in well with our general doctrine. 
For it makes trial an absolutely necessary element in 
all perfected character. If so much character does 
really go to pieces at its first contact with suffering 
and struggle, then all the more, no matter how terri- 
ble the waste may be, we see the need of keeping 
struggle and suffering as tests of character. We see 
that to sweep them away would be both an insult 
and a cruel harm to the nature which was meant to 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 7 

meet them, to crush and conquer and analyze them, 
to assimilate their strength out of them as a plant 
assimilates the nutriment out of the hindering ground 
through which it has to fight its way up into the 
sunshine, and to grow strong by struggle. You may 
just fling your seed upon the surface, and it will 
easily come to a sort of sickly germination. It has 
no earth to fight its way through, but then it has no 
earth to feed on, either; and the first of it is almost 
the last of it too. 

We cannot exaggerate the importance of the change 
which comes to pass in a man's life when he once 
thoroughly has learnt this simple truth. Disappoint- 
ments of every sort, sorrows, sufferings, trials, strug- 
gles, restlessness and dissatisfaction, false friends, 
poor health, low tastes and standards all about us — 
who shall enumerate the million forms, new to each 
man's new appreciation, in which life is to each man 
dark and not bright, bitter and not sweet ? Who 
shall catalogue the troubles of human life ? But 
who shall tell the difference between two men who 
live in different aspects of all these things? Are 
they intrusions, accidents, thwartings and disap- 
pointments of the will of God ? Or are they (this is 
what our doctrine says they are) Messiahs, things 
sent, having like the ships that sr.il to our ports from 
far-off lands of barbarian richness, rare spices and 
fragrant oils and choice foods that we cannot find at 
home, whose foreign luxuriance forces its odorous 
way through the coarse and uncouth coverings in 
which their wealth was packed away in the savage 



1 1 8 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 

lands from which they came? Are they prolific 
sources of spiritual culture, contributing what our 
best happiness could not have except from them, the 
energy and vitality which there is no way of stirring 
up in human nature but by some sense of danger, 
the fire to mingle with the glass. 

In sick-rooms, in prisons, in dreary, unsympathetic 
homes, in stores where failure brooded like the first 
haze of a coming eastern storm, everywhere where 
men have suffered, to some among the sufferers this 
truth has come. They lifted their heads up and were 
strong. Life was a new thing to them. They were 
no longer the victims of a mistaking chance or of a 
malignant devil, but the subjects of an edu eating- 
God. They no longer just waited doggedly for the 
trouble to pass away. They did not know that it 
ever would pass away. If it ever did it must go de- 
spoiled of its power. Whether it passed or stayed, 
that was not the point, but that the strength that was 
in it should pass into the sufferer who wrestled with 
it; that the fire should not only make the glass and 
then go out, leaving it cold and hard and brittle. 
The fire must abide in the glass that it has made, 
giving it forever its own warmth and life and elastic 
toughness. This is the great revelation of the per- 
manent value of suffering and struggle. 

But some lives still grow old, some men live 
strongly and purely in this world, you say, and then 
go safely and serenely up to heaven, who have no 
struggle anywhere, who never know what struggle 
is. What shall we say of them ? How are they 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 1 9 

ripened and saved ? How does the fire get into their 
sea of glass ? Ah, my dear friend, first yon ranst 
find your man. And you may search all the ages 
for him. You may go through the crowded streets 
of heaven, asking each saint how he came there, and 
you will look in vain everywhere for a man morally 
and spiritually strong, whose strength did not come 
to him in struggle. Will you take the man who 
never had a disappointment, who never knew a want, 
whose friends all love him, whose health never knew 
a suspicion of its perfectness, on whom every sun 
shines and against whose sails all winds, as if by 
special commission, are sent to blow, and who still is 
great and good and true and unselfish and holy, as 
happy in his inner as in his outer life ? Was there 
no struggle there? Do you suppose that man has 
never wrestled with his own success and happiness, 
that he has never prayed, and emphasized his prayer 
with labor, "In all time of my prosperity, Good 
Lord, deliver me ! — "Deliver me ! " — that is the cry of 
a man in danger, of a man with an antagonist. For 
years that man and his prosperity have been looking 
each other in the face and grappling one another. 
Whether he should rule it or it should rule him, that 
was the question. He saw plenty of men whose 
prosperity ruled them, had them for its slaves, bound 
them, and drove them, and beat them, and taunted 
them, mocked them with the splendid livery it made 
them wear, which was only the symbol of their serv- 
itude to it-, that dreadful prosperity of theirs which 
they must obey, no matter what it asked of them, to 



1 20 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire* 

which they must give up soul and body. He was 
determined it should not be so with him. He wres- 
tled with his prosperity and mastered it. His soul 
is not the slave of his rich store or of his comfortable 
house. They are the slaves of his soul. They must 
minister to its support and culture. He rules His, 
and that is a supremacy that was not won with- 
out a struggle, than which there is no harder on the 
earth. 

So that even here there is no exception. There is 
no exception anywhere. Every true strength is 
gained in struggle. Every poor soul that the 
Lord heals and frees goes up the street like the man 
at Capernaum, carrying its bed upon its back, the 
trophy of its conquered palsy. There are no glassy 
seas which will really bear the weight of strong 
men but those that have the fiery mingling. All 
others are counterfeits, and crack or break. 

There are several special applications of our doc- 
trine to the Christian life, which it is interesting to 
observe. 

I. It touches all the variations of Christian feeling. 
In almost every Christian's experience comes times 
of despondency and gloom, when there seems to be 
a depletion of the spiritual life, when the fountains 
that used to burst and sing with water are grown 
dry; when love is loveless, and hope hopeless, and 
enthusiasm so utterly dead and buried that it is 
hard for us to believe that it ever lived. At such 
times there is nothing for us to do but hold with 
eager hands to the bare rocky truths of our relig- 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 2 1 



ion as a shipwrecked man hangs to a strong ragged 
cliff when the great retiring wave and all the little 
eddies all together are trying to sweep him back 
into the deep. The rough rock tears his hands, but 
still he clings to it. And so the bold bare truths of 
God and Christ, of responsibility and eternity, un- 
clothed for the time of all the dearness that they 
used to have, how sometimes we have just to clutch, 
and hold fast by them in our darkness to keep from 
being swept off into recklessness and despair. Then 
when the tide returns, and we can hold ourselves 
lightly where we once had to hang heavily, when 
faith grows easy and God and Christ and responsi- 
bility and eternity are once more the glory and de- 
light of happy days and peaceful nights, then cer- 
tainly there is something new in them, a new color, 
a new warmth. The soul has caught a new idea of 
God's love when it has not only been fed but rescued 
by Him. The sheep has a new conception of his 
shepherd's care when he has not merely been made 
"to he down in green pastures," but also has heard 
the voice of him who had left the ninety and nine 
in the wilderness and gone after that which had 
wandered astray until he found it. The weakness 
of our own nature and the strength of that on which 
we rely : danger and its correlative, duty ; watchful- 
ness, and its great privilege, trust, come in together, 
and are the new life of the soul, the active power m 
its restored peace, the fire in its glassy sea. 

The same applies to doubt and belief. " Why 
do things seem so hard to me ?" you say ; " why does 



122 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 

every conceivable objection and difficulty start up 
in a moment, just as soon as I attempt to lay hold 
upon the Christian's faith ? Why is it so easy for 
these others to believe, so hard for me ?" One cai,- 
not answer certainly until he knows you better. 
There is a willful and an unwilling unbelief. If it is 
willful unbelief, the fault is yours. Man must not 
certainly complain that the sun does not shine on 
him, because he shuts his eyes. But if it is 
unwilling unbelief; if you really want the truth ; if 
you are not afraid to submit to it as soon as you 
shall see it, and it is something in your constitution, 
or in your circumstances, or in the side of Christian 
truth that has been held out to you that makes it 
more difficult for you to grasp it than your neighbor; 
then you are not to be pitied. You have a higher 
chance than he. To climb the mountain on its 
hardest side, where its rough granite ribs press 
out most ruggedly to make your climbing difficult, 
where you must skirt round chasms and clam- 
ber down and up ravines, all this has its compen- 
sations. You know the mountain better when you 
reach its top. It is a realler, a nobler, and so a 
dearer thing. 

If there be such here, let me speak to them. The 
world has slowly learnt that Christianity is true. If 
you learn slowly, it is only the old way over 
again. The man who learns slowly learns com- 
pletely, if he learns at last at all. If you canonly 
keep on bravely, perse veringly, seeking the truth, 
saying I must have it or I die; saying that till you 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 1 23 

do die ; dying at last, if needs be, in the search ; then 
I declare not only that somewhere, here or in some bet- 
ter world, the truth shall come to you ; but that when 
it comes the peace and the serenity of it shall be made 
vital with the energy of your long search. Yours 
shall be that faith with which a pure, truth-lov- 
ing soul may stand unashamed before the throne 
of God, and hear his work called "Well-done," 
and blessed and consecrated to perpetual value. 
You will believe better even in heaven for these 
earthly difficulties bravely met. For perfect truth- 
fulness must find the truth at last, or w r here is God? 
As we look out, the applications of our doctrine 
widen everywhere. What is the whole history of the 
world under the Gospel of forgiveness, from its first 
to its last, but one vast application of it. Here are 
men whose condition as perverted, mistaken, sinful 
beings makes it absolutely necessary that the dis- 
pensation that shall save them must be one not of mere 
culture and development but of rescue and repentance. 
Let the great future of those men be what it will ; 
let the sublimest regions of calm unbroken holiness 
be reached in some celestial sphere; let truth and 
godliness become the atmosphere and the uncon- 
scious life-blood of the perfected man, still the 
perfected man must carry somewhere in the nature 
which holds high converse with the angels and 
worships with affectionate awe close to the throne of 
God, the story of its sin and its escape. Redeemed, 
its great redemption must forever be the shaping 
and the coloring element of all its glorious life. 



124 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 

" Worthy is He who hath redeemed us " — that song 
the purest lips and the most exalted heart never will 
outgrow. 

Simon Peter is forgiven, re-adopted, becomes the 
preacher of the first sermon, the converter of 
the first Gentiles, the founder of churches, the 
writer of epistles, the champion of faith ; but he 
is always, to the last, the same Simon Peter who 
denied his Master and struggled with himself in all 
the bitterness of tears, upon the crucifixion night. 
Paul mounts up to the third heaven, hears wonder- 
ful voices, sees unutterable things, can give in bold 
humility the autobiography of the eleventh chapter 
to the Corinthians, but he never ceases to be the 
Paul who stood by at the stoning of Stephen, and 
had his great darkness rent asunder by the bright 
light that he saw upon the road from Jerusalem to 
Damasus. You and I, brethren, come by Christ's 
grace into sweet communion with God, but the 
power of our conversion — does it ever leave us ? 
Are not we prodigals still, with the best robe and the 
ring and the shoes upon us, and the fatted calf before 
us in our father's house, conscious always that our fil- 
ial love is full of the strength of hard repentance which 
first made us turn our faces homeward from among 
the swine ? And so the saved world never can forget 
that it was once the lost world. All of a history 
such as its has been accumulates, and none of it is 
lost. It will forever shine with a peculiar light, 
sing a psalm among its fellows that shall be all its 
own. The redeemed world — all the strong vitality 



The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 125 

which that name records, will be the fire that will 
mingle with the glassy serenity of its obedient and 
rescued life. 

Here then we have the picture of the everlasting 
life. What will heaven be ? What will be the sub- 
stance on which they shall stand who worship God 
and praise him in the ages of eternity ? I find man- 
ifold fitness in the answer that tells us that it shall 
be a " sea of glass mingled with fire." Is it not a 
most graphic picture of that experience of rest 
always pervaded with activity; of calm, transparent 
contemplation, always pervaded and kept alive by 
eager work and service, which is our highest and most 
Christian hope of heaven ? Let us be sure that our 
expectations regarding heaven are scriptural and 
true. Heaven will not be pure stagnation, not idle- 
ness, not any mere luxurious dreaming over the spirit- 
ual repose that has been safely and forever won ; but 
active, tireless, earnest work ; fresh, live enthusiasm 
for the high labors which eternity will offer. These 
vivid inspirations will play through our deep repose 
and make it more mighty in the service of God than 
any feverish and unsatisfied toil of earth has ever 
been. The sea of glass will be mingled with fire. 

Here too we have the type and standard of that 
heavenliness of character which ought to be ripening 
in all of us now, as we are getting ready for that 
spiritual life. As men by the grace of God gra- 
dually win the " victory over the beast," they begin 
already to walk upon the sea of glass mingled with 
fire. Let this be the lesson with which we close our 



126 The Sea of Glass Mingled with Fire. 

thoughts upon our text. Surely, dear friends, there 
is a very high and happy life conceivable, which very 
few of us attain, and yet which our religion most evi- 
dently intends for all of us. Calm and yet active, 
peaceful and yet thoroughly alive, resting always 
completely upon truth, but never sleeping on it for a 
moment, working always intensely, but serene and 
certain of results, never driven crazy by our work, 
grounded and settled, yet always moving forward in 
still but sure progress, always secure, yet always 
alert — glass mingled with fire. 

That life which we dream of in ourselves we see in 
Jesus. Where was there ever gentleness so full of 
energy? What life as still as his was ever so per- 
vaded with untiring and restless power ? Who ever 
knew the purposes for which he worked to be so sure, 
and yet so labored for them as if they were uncertain ? 
Who ever believed his truths so entirely, and yet be- 
lieved them so vividly as Jesus ? Such perfect peace 
that never grew listless for a moment; such perfect 
activity that never grew restless or excited; these 
are the wonders of the life of Him who going up and 
down the rugged ways of Palestine, was spiritually 
walking on "the sea of glass mingled with fire." 

As more and more we get the victory over the beast, 
we too are lifted up to walk where he walked. For 
this all trial, all suffering, and all struggle are sent. 
May God grant us all much of that grace through 
which we can be " more than conquerors through him 
who loved us," and so begin now to " walk with him 
in white," upon " the sea of glass mingled with fire." 



SERMON VIII. 

f he §**rotifiil (fert* ni the iempte, 

" The Beautiful gate of the temple." — Acts iii. 10. 

PETER and John went up to the temple to- 
gether, and as they went they passed through 
"the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful." 
This gate must have been very beautiful indeed. It 
was the outer gate of the temple, that which opened 
upon the temple area from the broad and splendid 
street which led from the city to the sacred place. 
As the entering worshipper passed through this gate, 
the glory of the splendid structure displayed itself 
before him. He saw the open courts, the vistas of 
the galleries, the sweep of stairs, the brilliant walls 
of the temple of Herod. Entering by the Beautiful 
gate, he saw the whole in all its beauty. And the 
gate itself was worthy of the view on which it 
opened. It was made entirely of the precious Corin- 
thian brass, and its workmanship surpassed that of 
every other gate in all the temple. There was a cer- 
tain satisfied sense of fitness here. The gate which 
opened on the sublime and beautiful prospect was 

beautiful and sublime itself. The worshipper entered 

127 



128 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

on the glory of the temple through a portal that fore- 
told the coming glory by its own. 

The architecture of the old Jewish Temple may 
serve us for a parable to-da} T . The truth that it sug- 
gests will be the harmony between a noble under- 
taking and a beautiful beginning — that every true 
temple ought to have a beautiful gate. The impor- 
tance of beginnings is the veriest common-place of 
practical virtue. That first step which costs, we 
know, cannot be too costly, if it starts the enterprise 
aright. And when we look at the fairest things that 
have been, or that have been done ever in the world, 
we are much struck by seeing how often the en- 
trance has been at least worthy of, and, alas, how 
often it has surpassed with its beauty, the court to 
which it gave admission. The whole world had its 
beautiful gate in those days of innocence and perfect 
happiness which passed in Eden before man's sin and 
the sorrow that it brings began. Christianity com- 
menced its career with the perfect Life of Jesus, and 
then the simple beauty of the Apostolic Church, to 
which our later eyes are ever looking back. So 
every human life starts in the beautiful mystery of 
childhood. So every nation begins its career in the 
romance of some mythology, or the idealized memory 
of some heroic man to whom it owes its being. So 
every mans labor in his profession opens with the 
days of study and theory, when the idea of his pro- 
fession is beautiful and clear before him. So every 
best friendship and life-long love starts in a glamor 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 1 2 9 

of admiration that almost worships the image of the 
coveted friend. 

We might dwell upon several of these, but let us 
think only of the wisdom and love of God who has 
put the beauty of youth at the entrance of every hu- 
man life. Through that Beautiful gate every man 
comes into the temple. The temple is beautiful it- 
self. Life is filled with joy and sacredness. But how 
few lives are more beautiful than the youth that 
leads to them ! And how the noblest lives are prom- 
ised in their youth by fair anticipations of their com- 
ing beauty ! And then think again that the highest 
life always is religious. The best glory of the most 
full existence is in the overfilling of its fulness with 
the love and fear of God. And that sets us to asking 
whether to the beautiful temple of a mature religious 
life there is also a beautiful gate. Is there such 
a thing as a child's religion worthy of, and ad- 
mitting to, the broad thoughtful ness and happy de- 
votion of the mature religion of the grown man and 
woman, as there is a child's body and a child's mind, 
with their own beauty, worthy of and introducing to 
the physical and mental life of later years ? 

This brings us to our subject. I shall not ride the 
parable to death. I shall not weary you with Gates 
and Temples. I only wanted by the old passage in 
the Buok of Acts to suggest our theme. I want to 
speak of the child's religion. The child's religion, as 
introductory to the religion of maturity, but yet as a 
distinct reality which has a substantial existence of 
its own. It surely is a subject which has its interest 



130 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

for everybody. The parents who care for their own 
children, the teachers to whose care the children are 
immediately intrusted, the Church which has its com- 
mission to all the world, and evidently must not leave 
the children out, the lover of his kind who looks for 
its religious progress — where is the man who can say 
or think that he need have no interest in the possibil- 
ity and character and means of children's religion? 
Here are the children all among us, and yet we often 
talk to one another, as if nobody under twenty had 
anything to do with the great things which are of 
such unspeakable importance after we have come of 
age. Here are the children all among us, and many 
a time a minister stops in his sermon and feels dis- 
heartened — almost dismayed — when he thinks how 
he is going on year after year, saying almost never a 
word in church, to tell the children that the Christ he 
talks of is not a gray lecturer, giving grown men 
lectures on hard dry truths, but a kind friend, young 
with the divine youth of eternity, and wanting them 
to come to him. Here are the children among us, and 
we open our Sunday-school and make it bright for 
them, and do get very close to them there with the 
love of God, but all the while we feel (and the chil- 
dren are quick and sensitive enough to feel it too), 
that the Church does not more than half know what 
to do with them ; its theories and machineries are 
made for grown up people. It wishes the children 
would hurry and grow up, so that it might know how 
to talk to, what to do with, what to make of them. 
They belong to the Church, and yet do not belong to 



The Beatitiful Gate of the Temple. 1 3 1 

it. Here are the children all around us, and yet we 
have to begin to speak of a child's religion by saying 
something about the very possibility of such a thing. 
And the first thing that we must say, when we 
are asked whether it is possible for a child to be 
religious, must be this, I think; that the religion of 
childhood is not only possible, but is the normal type 
of religion; is that which Christianity most contem- 
plates, and that which, when Christianity shall have 
really entered into her power, all men shall accept as 
the very image and pattern of religion. We might 
as well ask whether a child's life is possible. The 
child is the embodiment of life, life in its freshness 
and first glory. As unnatural and exceptional as is 
the birth of a man full-grown — an Adam or an Eve 
without a childhood — to the true idea of living, so 
unnatural and exceptional to the true notion of relig- 
ion is the thought of a grown up man being convert- 
ed, beginning his religious life with the stiff move- 
ments and faded affections of mature years. The 
New Testament is our book of authority: but the 
New Testament is always leading men astray, be- 
cause they deal with it unreasonably, because they 
do not take into account the times in which it was 
first written. And so the current idea of the 
churches, which has only just begun to be dislodged, 
that adult conversion is the type and intended rule 
of Christianity, comes largely from the fact that the 
first preachers of Christianity had of necessity to be 
largely occupied with men who had known nothing 
of Christianity in their youth. Peter and Paul had 



132 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

to go to grown up men, and ask them to begin the 
Christian life. But surely that was not to be the 
perpetual picture of Christian culture. Christ was 
too human for that. God had written through all 
his creation, in the interweaving of young life with 
old, his intention that one continuous culture should 
run through the whole scale of the human creature's 
development. Christ had been too evidently a 
child ; the incarnation had too evidently taken all 
of life into its benediction, for the children ever to 
be wholly counted out. The great Erasmus once 
wrote a piece in Latin for a boy to speak which had 
this last thought beautifully put: "We commemo- 
rate," so he taught the young declaimer with his 
bright eye and his glowing face to say, " we boys 
commemorate the boy — pueri pu?rum — we commemo- 
rate our Master Jesus, the chief ideal of all, but yet 
peculiarly the chief of us — that is, of boys." The 
evident design of God's creation, the comprehensive 
form of the incarnation, the clear presence in child- 
ren of the power of and the need of religion, these 
are the forces which, in spite of every tendency of 
the grown people to make children wait till they 
grow up, has always kept alive a hope, a trust, how- 
ever blind, that a child's religion was a possible 
reality ; that a child might serve and love and live 
for God. 

But even where this has been granted, the old 
feeling that religion belongs to adult people, still has 
power, and defeats the best results of that faith in 
the religious possibilities of children which has been 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 133 

persistently uttered in the Church's sacrament of 
baptism, and which has in modern times founded the 
Sunday-school, and created the vast religious litera- 
ture of childhood. The old feeling still is strong 
enough, while it allows the possibility of children's 
being religious, to insist that their religion must be 
of the sort that has taken shape for adults alone. 
Eead many of the children's religious books, listen 
to many of the children's sermons, and you will 
understand in a moment why they have not wrought 
their fruit and filled our churches with young 
Samuels and Timothys and Marys. They attempt 
to impose upon the child the religion that belongs 
to the man. They take the elaborate self-conscious 
experience to which men have been forced by the 
stresses of their life, and they bid the children look 
at those experiences and imitate them, and so be 
religious. The result is that nine-tenths of the 
children do not get hold of religion at all, and accept 
the easy heathenism to which they seem consigned; 
while the other tenth get hold of it only too 
much, and are the self-conscious little saints, the 
priggish and pedantic Christians whom it is so sad to 
see and so easy to caricature. So it comes about 
that, though it is the type of truest Christianity, a 
really healthy Christian life in a child is a rare sight. 
There have been some men, of whom one can hardly 
express himself too strongly, who have gone through 
the country preaching what they call children's revi- 
vals, taking that type of the beginning of a new life 
which belongs to thieves and murderers, and gray 



134 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

old reprobates, who by the grace of God are casting 
off the vices of a horrible lifetime, and repenting of 
the most brutal sins — an experience full of convul- 
sion and agony, who try only too successfully to 
create a counterfeit of that experience in the child- 
ren whom they want to convert. It is a real dis- 
belief in the reality of a child's religion, and so an 
attempt to make the child assume the man's. It is 
the modern echo of that medieval marvel which was 
called the children's crusade, when their leaders took 
the children of Europe and led them as their fathers 
were going to the conquest of Jerusalem, and wasted 
their little lives by hundreds all along the weary 
and disastrous way. 

But even where the sad extravagance and blunder 
of the children's revival is not attempted, and could 
not be tolerated, still I am sure that we are making 
a corresponding error when we try to force truth in 
the hard scholastic shapes into which men have cast it 
on the minds of the young. Every theologian must 
own that his theology is harder than the New Testa- 
ment. It is the New Testament and not his theolo- 
gy that he ought to teach the child. The child's 
mind is natural and not artificial. Our theological 
systems are artificial and arbitrary, not natural. 
And the child, while he can make nothing of the bal- 
ancing of persons in the scholastic doctrines of the 
Trinity, will know quicker than you or I the mean- 
ing of the equal divine love of Father, Saviour and 
Spirit. Though his mind will make nothing of the 
notion of a scheme of an atonement, he will under- 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 135 

stand wonderfully that Jesus lived and died for him. 
Though he will cast off the notion of an angry God, 
wreaking vengeance on his creatures forever and 
forever, he will understand that sin is dreadful, and 
must bring, of its own essential nature, dreadful con- 
sequences ; and that of those consequences none but 
he who knows the measure of the sin can see the 
end. Who can say what a power children may some 
day have over religious thought, in bringing back 
Christianity, as we long to see it brought, from a 
scheme of complicated and artificial arrangements 
to be the free utterance of the heart of God to 
man ? 

And so we come to this; that while men believe 
in the possibilities of children's being religious, they 
are largely failing to make them so becanse they are 
offering them not a child's, but a man's religion, men's 
forms of truth and men's forms of experience. The 
child makes nothing out of either. The one power 
that he has and longs to nse is the power of personal 
loyalty and love. He wants Christ. When through 
the systems here and there the personal Christ steps 
forth, the true character of the child's religion always 
suggests itself, as the child runs to him. 

I have already said that there was something in 
the Epistles that had worked to the discouragement 
of children's piety; but there is nothing of that in 
the Gospels. The Gospels come after the Old Testa- 
ment, like spring after winter. There is child-life in 
the Old Testament, but it is crushed and buried. 
When Jesus appears, the children come singing Ho- 



136 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

sannas, and asking him to bless them, as the ground 
laughs with its flowers when the sun gets high. 

And then our next question comes. If there is 
such a thing as a child's religion, and if men have 
made great mistakes because they did not understand 
it, then, what is it ? What is the true character of the 
religion of a child ? Certainly, to be sweet and real, 
it must be the possession by God of the faculties and 
qualities that belong especially to childhood. And 
it is not hard to enumerate some of those qualities at 
least. The first and most prominent of them all is 
the faculty of genuine, unqualified, unhesitating ad- 
miration. The grown man has to find out his ideals 
with difficulty. The world is tarnished to him. He 
has to abstract himself, and it is by a labored effort 
that he culls out from under its stained and battered 
surface the unseen and beautiful idea and promise 
which is at the heart of everything. But a child 
has no such effort. To him the world is beautiful, 
and he sees everything easily in its perfection. 
While the grown man is ready first to criticise, and 
only afterwards to discover what there is good and 
beautiful in the faulty thing, the child is struck first 
with admiration, and only reluctantly discovers that 
what he admires is not wholly good. Now this dif- 
ference surely must tell upon the kind of religion 
that we are to look for in the earlier and the later 
life. There is a religion which finds the world un- 
satisfying, and so turns longingly, wistfully, patheti- 
cally, wearily to God. There is another religion which 
finds the world wondrously beautiful and good, yet 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 137 

always suggesting something more beautiful and 
better than itself, and this religion too turns to God, 
but glowingly, springingly, hopefully. The first re- 
ligion starts from a sense of sin and comes to God for 
forgiveness. The second religion starts in a thank- 
ful joy, a sense of promise, and comes to God for ful- 
filment. The first starts with disgust at self, and so 
comes to love for God. The second starts in admira- 
tion of God, and so comes to forgetfulness of self. 

It is needless to say that both these religions meet 
in the fullest religious experiences ; but it is evident 
which of them most naturally belongs to the exper- 
ience of a child. You cannot teach a child that ha- 
tred of himself, you cannot fill him w T ith that sense 
of sin that sends the worn and weary sinner with his 
load of sins staggering up to cast them down before 
the cross. The attempt to create such experiences 
in children either kills them with morbid misery or 
makes them dreadful little hypocrites. But this 
power of admiration in the child promises its own 
religion, of its ow T n natural kind. His are the years 
in which one can really believe in ideals. God can 
stand out before him, awful, yet dear; for to the 
child to whom all is mysterious, nearness and awful- 
ness do not destroy one another as they do to us old- 
er folk. No doubt of God's faithfulness, no question- 
ing of His ways comes in to cloud the perfectly un- 
spotted adoration. How good it is that there are 
years at the beginning of every life -when it is the 
most easy thing to believe in an absolute right and 
goodness. How strange it is that we should not 



138 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple, 

use those precious years for the attainment of their 
own appropriate and beautiful religion. We grudge 
children their ideals. There are the much abused 
Sunday-school books which many good people unite 
to condemn. They are bad enough, many of them ; 
but that which is made the special object of abuse in 
them, that they describe unnaturally perfect boys 
and girls, is not necessarily a fault. If the perfect 
children they describe are only healthy and not 
sickly in their virtue, they just meet and cultivate 
that belief in the possibility of perfection which is 
instinctive in a child's heart, and which in a man's is 
so often, so soon, buried deep under the accumulated 
conviction of the reality of sin. The present tenden- 
cy of those who write children's books is to describe 
not the perfect child, but children as they are. The 
old-fashioned way was truer to the child's idealizing 
nature. For the first feature of a child's religion will 
be this, which we cannot ignore, that a child will 
come to God far oftener and far closer from love of 
the good than from hatred of the evil. 

And then another thing in a child's religion is the 
perfect healthiness of his traditionalism, of his be- 
longing to a certain sect and holding to certain 
opinions. So many grown people seem to have 
mixed up as much of evil as of good in their adher- 
ence to the faith of their fathers. They cling to it 
controversially. Their love for it is mixed up with 
jealousy and spite and pride. A child knows nothing 
of all that. His denomination, his creed, is like his 
nation, or his home. It is his because he was born 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 139 

there. It is dear to him with the unquestioning sense 
that he belongs to it and it to him. Alas, that our 
sectarian lines are drawn so narrow that very often 
a child cannot keep this simple home feeling as he 
grows up; alas, that so often as the child goes on to 
develope his own appropriate type of Christian faith 
and feeling, he finds that the sect in which he was 
born will not hold his special aspect of the truth, and 
so has to go abroad and break the ties of earliest 
sympathy in order to be the Christian that the Lord 
meant him to be. Alas, that we are all such secta- 
rians, whatever we may call ourselves, and that the 
great idea of a whole Christian Church is as yet so 
little realized. But these are troubles which the 
man grows into. The child may freely glory in his 
own Church, and yet be no sectarian; may accept 
his creed from the lips of others, and yet be no dog- 
matist. And so a second feature in the child's relig- 
ion will be this — a healthy traditionalism, a warm, 
true love for the Church he is brought up in ; not an 
abstract and general, but a clear, localized religion. 
The true parent, the true teacher, will try not mere- 
ly to make the child love God, but to make him love 
his own church, as the place where he knows God, 
and where he finds God always. 

And then again, as a child is able to love his own 
church without any of the evil effects of sectarianism, 
so he is able to love the organizations and habits of 
the Church, without the evil effects of formalism. 
The child's nature is poetic. This is seen in the ease 
with which it feels the symbolic character of sym- 



140 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

bolic things. Its symbols are real symbols; they 
really stand for something besides themselves, some- 
thing unseen. Now formalism comes largely from 
the sheer loss of the poetic sense. The stupidity of 
ritualism is the prosaic way in which its symbols 
have lost their meaning, and become valuable in 
and for themselves. This is the way in which many 
people make a Fetish of the Church. The Church is 
the most poetic of all things, so long as men see her 
with poetic eyes, so long as her outward shows 
stand for spiritual truths ; but there never was any- 
thing so wretchedly prosaic as the outward shows 
and ways of the Church, her visible sacraments and 
tactual successions, when they have ceased to be 
merely representative of spiritual verities and are 
valued for themselves. Now, is it saying too much 
to claim that a child with his nature full of poetry is 
able to take and use the ceremonies and external 
things of the Church and keep their meaning, as many 
men cannot? He needs them. It is all very well for 
you to say that you can worship without a liturgy, 
and without the company of a congregation. You 
think you can. You have faith in your power for 
abstracted and solitary devotion ; but it is not right 
for you to assume that your child can do it. This 
is why, as I think, all the children of a parish such 
as this, even those who are best taught at home, ought 
to be gathered into the parish Sunday School, which 
for many purposes is their church. Apart from 
what they learn there, it brings them into a true 
conscious partnership in the church and its work- 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 141 

ings, makes itself their church, fills them with its 
spirit, lets ^hem understand its life, and look on it as 
their home. This is why I wish all the children of 
our church were there. 

Only one thing more let me say about the charac- 
ter of the child's religion. Is it not true that the 
simplest and primary form of the presentation of the 
Gospel is the one which is preserved most truly and 
necessarily in the teaching of children? The Gos- 
pel came first into the world as good news. It was 
a simple, glorious story, told in the purest and direct- 
est way. It was a message, a revelation, God's love 
to man, God's pity and salvation for man, told by 
the roadside and the wellside, told in the temple 
courts, told from the cross. But how that first con- 
ception of the Gospel gets blurred and lost. To us 
grown men, the Gospel is a philosophy of life, a sys- 
tem to be argued about, almost anything but a mes- 
sage coming right down from God to man. But the 
child's nature is all receptive of stories, open for 
messages on every side. The child is a little Athe- 
nian, always listening for some new thing. All the 
world about him is* mysterious, ever breaking out 
into tidings of itself. And so the child is ready, 
if it can be rightly told him, to hear, above all 
the other messages that come to him out of this 
ever opening and surprising world, the best and 
highest news of all, the Gospel, simply as glad tid- 
ings of the love of God and the salvation of the 
world by Jesus. 

I must not mention more; but put together in 



142 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

your own mind these characteristics of a child's relig- 
ion which we have recounted, and see if you have 
not a recognizable and beautiful conception as their 
result. It is no monstrous thing. It is no priggish 
and unpleasant aping of what is possible only for 
maturer life. It is a true child who loves God and 
sees everything beautiful in Him, who loves the 
Church and finds its ways and forms full of signifi- 
cance and pleasure, and who hears and accepts as 
part of the story of the world which it is gradually 
learning to know, the story of how God loved that 
world, so that He came into it and lived here and 
died here, to help every man to live in holiness and 
to save every man when he fell into sin. There is no 
child for whom that religion is not possible. Brave, 
true, frank, gentle, joyous, what is there better than 
this in the labored religion of our later days ? It is 
not only a promise, it is a present reality. The boy is 
not only a little man, he is a boy, with his own pres- 
ent capacity of character. He is even now " a mem- 
ber of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the 
kingdom of heaven." 

We have said something of the possibility and of 
the character of a child's religion. And now we 
want to go on and say a little of the methods of it; 
how is it to be created in all its beauty in these chil- 
dren whom you know ? Ah, first of all, let us feel for 
our comfort and humility that the power to create it 
rests far back of our feebleness. They are Gods 
children. We stand over the little stalk and say, 
"How shall I make this flower grow ?" Think how 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 143 

God must listen to us as we say that. God who 
made the growing power of that little flower, and 
ripened it in the flora of worlds that perished before 
oar history began. No education can be true or fruit- 
ful which forgets the perfect education of which it is 
but a minister. No man can care wisely or well for 
any one he loves, who dares forget that God is caring 
for that friend of his, whether he be old man or little 
boy, with a wisdom and love incomprehensible. I 
cannot but think how many families and schools it 
would at once fill with happy earnestness and relieve 
of nervous anxiousness to be pervaded with this re- 
membrance continually. So often grown people here 
pass out of childhood and become incapable of deal- 
ing with children. But God is always young and 
always sympathises with the children whom He 
sends into the world. 

Bear this in mind, and then before as opens the 
work of helping under God in the training of his 
children. It is not easy. The child's nature every- 
where shows its imperfecta ess. It is hard to open 
it for what it ought to receive, and it is hard to close 
it against what it ought to reject. It is like the 
beautiful gate with which we are comparing it, for 
Josephus tells us about that gate, that it took the 
strength of twenty men to open it or close it. I am 
not going to undertake a general treatise on the 
Christian education of children. There are only two 
suggestions which I want to make and urge w T ith all 
the force I can upon those to whom the training of 
children is intrusted. 



144 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

The first is this; the absolute need of perfect 
truthfulness in children's religious training. Nobody, 
I think, can look at the strange state of religious 
thought in this day, without seeing at once the im- 
portance and the difficulty of making truthfulness 
first and absolute when we try to teach children re- 
ligious truth or to excite them to religious feeling. 
Religious truth has passed in many people's minds 
into new forms. Men hold other conceptions than 
they held twenty years ago. I do not argue now 
whether the newer theology is more or less true ; but 
many an earnest thinker to whom the truth has 
come with a freshness and a force to his own soul in 
some new shape, will still, as he undertakes to teach 
children, tell them not what he believes, give them 
not the fresh food on which he knows that his own 
soul is nourished, but spread before them traditional 
statements of orthodoxy which are ordinarily reputed 
safer, but which he himself really does not believe. 
He has not full faith in his truth. He is willing to 
rest himself, nay, he is gladly resting himself upon 
it daily for salvation ; but when he comes to teach the 
children, he draws back, and from a curious mixture 
of timidity and care for them and spiritual faithless- 
ness, he puts before them some dead husks instead 
of the live truth on which he feeds. Are there not 
many parents and teachers whose views of the Bible 
as God's Book, of the Lord's Day as His festival, of 
the Atonement as the free expression of His love, of 
the Resurrection of the body and the life in heaven, 
are free, rational, scriptural and vital, who will yet 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 145 

teach their children as they were taught, in hard, 
mechanical and untrue statements of those great 
Christian verities ? It keeps the religious education 
of our nurseries and Sunday-schools too often behind 
the best religious conviction of the time. It is 
not right. I do not ask that every crude speculation 
should be immediately thrust upon the minds of 
trusting children, who will take it in all its crudeness 
for a settled conviction; but I do believe that he 
who is set to teach children about God, should show 
to them the best and fullest that the Lord has shown 
to him, and not another something which he does 
not believe, but which for some reason he has come 
to think is best for them at present. 

See what are the evils of such strange conduct. 
In the first place, it is insincere in the teacher. 
That is reason enough against it. In the second 
place, it will be ineffective, for a man cannot teach 
with his whole heart what he only half-heartedly 
believes. The bright eyes of the children will see 
through him. And, in the third place, it is doing 
fearful wrong to the children's future, who must 
find out some day that what they have learned is 
not true, and so must give it up; and in giving up 
your feeble and false version of it, will stand in ter- 
rible danger of giving up the Christian religion alto- 
gether. 

No, give the children the best that God has given 

you. Teach them nothing that you do not believe 

they can carry on, growing to them with their 

growth, through all this life, into the life beyond. 
10 



146 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

There is a difference between a child's religion and a 
man's religion, but remember always it is not a 
difference of false and true. The child's religion 
must be like the clothes with which the Israelite 
children started out of Egypt, which, according to 
the old legend, grew as they grew till the boys and 
girls were men and women. To have a partial re- 
ligion grow into a perfect religion, is one of the most 
natural and healthy processes of human life. To 
change a false religion for a true one is the most 
necessary, but most violent struggle of the human 
soul. 

There is a class of books and teachers — the ordi- 
nary Sunday School talker, is often of that sort — who, 
it seems to me, does very much, partly from timidity, 
partly from laziness, partly from sensationalism, to 
keep a certain unreality and insincerity in the relig- 
ious teaching of the young. Everywhere but in 
religion, in history, in science, each new and truer 
view, as soon as it is once established, passes instant- 
ly into the school books of the land. Am 1 not right 
in saying that there are great convictions about 
scripture and the Christian : aith which are heartily 
accepted by the great mass of thinking Christian 
people now, which are not being taught to the 
children of to-day ? If that is so, as I fear it is, thun 
this new generation has got to fight over again the 
battle that our generation has fought, and fight it, 
too, less hopefully, because there will have been less 
of sincerity in its education. It is always a better and 
safer process to outgrow a doctrine that we have been 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 147 

sincerely taught, than to abandon one that had no real 
hold upon our teacher's mind. In the first case we 
keep much of the sincerity, even if we let the doctrine 
go. In the second case, when we let go the doc- 
trine, there is nothing left. Is there not here the 
secret of much of the ineffective religious teaching 
of the young, of the way they cast our teaching off 
when they grow up ? No ! my dear friends, all of you 
anywhere who are called to teach, with larger faith in 
truth, with larger faith in God, with wise love for 
his children, I beg you to make truthfulness the 
first law of your teaching. Never tell a child that 
he must believe what you do not believe, nor teach 
him that he must go through any experience which 
you are not sure is necessary to his conversion and 
his Christian life. 

And then the other principle that I wanted to re- 
mind you of, was the necessity of a larger element of 
suggestiveness in the best training of a religious na- 
ture. A child is not a block of marble, to be hewn 
out into what you will. A child, and especially a 
child considered as a religious being, is a plant which 
you are to set into the right soil of truth, and then 
watch as it developes its own special nature. And 
every child is a separate and peculiar plant, different 
from every other. What shall the teacher do then ? 
Not say, "I will make of this child before me, this 
or that," but " I will quicken every activity with its 
own spiritual stimulus. I will break off the chains 
and get every obstruction of sin and slothfulness out 
of the way, and help this child to be what God made 



148 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 

him to be, whatever it is." A teacher who says that, 
brings truth always so fresh to each young life that 
it can be eaten and turned into that life's own forms 
of action; not hard and fossilized, so that it must 
always be kept in just the shape in which it is first 
given. He will not be surprised or disappointed 
when he sees his pupil developing a type of Christian 
life different from his own. If it is only real, and pure 
from all conceit, and truly full of Christ, he will be 
delighted to watch it, and rejoice more to have given 
an impulse to a movement which shall far outrun him- 
self, than he ever could have rejoiced to train a hun- 
dred scholars into mere echoes and repetitions of his 
imperfect individuality. 

This power of suggestiveness runs everywhere. 
More is accomplished in this world always by the 
suggestions of motive and force than by the imposi- 
tions of form and rule. He who believes in sugges- 
tion has trust in the vital powers of things. The 
whole world is waiting to start into far higher action 
than anything yet, if one could only touch its springs. 
This is the beauty, this must be the quiet satisfaction 
of the lives of those obscure and patient workers 
who build nothing themselves, but who suggest the 
need and wish of building to other minds greater 
than theirs. Think of being the schoolteacher of 
Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pascal; and yet only a 
few antiquarians know the name of either. Surely 
there are last that shall be first. Surely this power 
of suggestiveness must always be the teacher's wisest 
and best. 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple. 149 

Let me rest with these two ideas. You see at 
once how both of them, truthfulness and sugges- 
tiveness, are words of personal character. In all 
teaching, but most of all in religious teaching, the 
personal nature of the teacher is supreme. 

" I am thy God that teacheth thee," Jehovah said. 
Only in deity are met perfectly those qualities that 
make the perfect Being, " apt to teach." We are 
under teachers in God's school here. But what a 
light all this throws upon that which seems so ter- 
rible to us on earth, the sad and awful mystery of a 
child's death. , What is it when a child dies ? It is 
the great head-master calling that child up into his 
own room, away from all the under-teachers, to finish 
his education under his own eye, close at his feet. 
The whole thought of a child's growth and develop- 
ment in heaven instead of here on earth, is one of the 
most exalting and bewildering on which the mind 
can rest. Always the child must be there. Always 
there must be something in those who died as child- 
ren to make them different to all eternity from those 
who grew up to be men here among all the tempta- 
tions and hindrances of earth. There must forever be 
something in their perfect trust in the Father, some- 
thing in the peculiar nearness and innocent familiar- 
ity of their life with Jesus, something in the sim- 
plicity and instinctiveness of their relation to the 
truth, something pure even among all the perfect 
purity which we shall all have reached, something 
wiser than the wisest, showing that even there there 
is a revelation that can be given only to the babes. 



1 50 The Beautiful Gate of the Temple, 

Something more perfectly triumphant and serene to 
mark forever the perfected life of those who never 
sinned, and whose whole education has been in the 
full sunlight of their Father's presence. There will 
be seen forever what we have tried so dimly to depict 
to-day, the possibility and beauty of a child's religion. 
We hear much in these days of the precocity of 
children. Never were they so forward. Never were 
children treated so like men and women. Never did 
they get ideas so freely from the freest contact with 
the life about them. It may be bad or good; which- 
ever it be, it marks a critical time and multiplies the 
responsibility of those who in any capacity are 
teachers now. Josephus tells us that once in the . 
seige of Jerusalem this golden gate which we have 
made the image of childhood, vastly heavy and hard 
to move, " was seen to be opened of its own accord 
about the sixth hour of the night." And he says 
that some thought it was a good omen, "as if 
God did open then the gate of happiness." But 
others thought it very bad, "as if the gate was open 
to the advantage of their enemies." So in this criti- 
cal time of ours, not the least critical sign is this: 
that the golden gate stands open wide; that child- 
hood is exposed and sensitive to new impressions 
and ideas. Is it for good or evil ? Certainly, not 
necessarily for evil, if w T ith a deep trust in God and 
a true love for His children, those to whom the care 
of the gate is given can only do their duty. The 
wider open the gate the better, if only the truth can 
be poured in. The more receptive the children's 



The Beautiful Gate of the Temple, 1 5 1 

life the better, if only they who train the children 
can thoroughly believe that there is a manly and 
beautiful religion of which, the child is capable, and 
work with God to bring their children to it. When 
that conviction takes possession of the Church, then 
the Church shall indeed have her children in her 
arms. Then Isaiah's vision of the complete New 
Jerusalem shall be fulfilled. " Thou shalt call thy 
walls salvation, and thy gates praise." 



SERMON IX. 

A FOREIGN MISSIONARY SERMON. 

11 And when it was day he called unto him his disciples, and of them 
he chose twelve, whom also he named Apostles." — Luke vi. 13. 

I WANT to speak to you to-day of Foreign Mis- 
sions. I hope and I believe that it is not an un- 
welcome subject. It would be very melancholy, I 
think, if after all these years in which we have pon- 
dered and studied together the Gospel of our Sa- 
viour, and learnt in all the changing experiences of 
life something of its precious value, Ave should still 
find our hearts grudging the single Sunday of the 
year which is given to the special consideration of 
our duty to make the whole world sharer in that 
Gospel which we claim to love. Rather this Sunday 
ought to seem the flowering Sunday of the year. 
To-day we ought to seem to come into the very heart 
of the Gospel. The other Sundays may well seem 
beside it to have been lingering upon the borders of 
our faith. To-day we come directly to its centre, 

and, with true confidence in both, claim our Saviour 
152 



Disciples and Apostles. 153 

for the world and claim the Avorld for our Saviour. 
May such a mind and spirit be in us to-day. 

I have turned for a text to one of the critical times 
in the life of Jesus. It was not a time which made 
much noise. The act which Jesus did was very 
quiet. It did not come with observation. Only after- 
wards, as time went on, did it appear how important 
the event really was. But when we look at it to-day 
we can see that it marked the advance of the whole 
work of Jesus, from its first into its second stage ; 
from the condition of a local school, into the ambi- 
tion of a world-wide religion. It is all told in a few 
words. Jesus " went out into a mountain to pray, and 
continued all night in prayer to God. And when it 
was day he called unto him his disciples, and of them 
he chose twelve, whom also he named apostles." It 
was the time when out of the heart of the disciple- 
ship came the apostleship. And what do these 
words mean ? Disciple, of course, means learner. 
The idea rests entirely between two persons, the 
teacher and the scholar. It involves nothing but the 
receiving of knowledge by some one docile mind. 
But Apostle means missionary. Its idea is utterance, 
or sending forth. It sees and feels the great wide 
world. It looks out to the very horizon of humanity. 
It takes truth not as a lesson, but as a message. 
What the disciple has drunk into his own satisfied 
soul, the apostle is to carry abroad, wherever there 
are men to hear it. 

When then Jesus turned his disciples into apostles, 
you see what an event it was. It was really the 



154 Disciples and Apostles. 

flowering of that Gospel which he had been pouring 
into them through ail their diseipleship. The plant 
fills itself with the richness of the earth. No noise 
is made. The whole transaction lies between the 
plant and the rich earth that feeds it through its 
open roots. All is silent, private, restricted. But 
some day the world looks, and lo ! the process has 
burst open. Upon the long-fed plant is burning a 
gorgeous flower for the world to see. The long sup- 
ply of nourishment has opened into a great display 
of glory. The earth has sent its richness through 
the plant to enlighten and to bless the world. The 
disciple has turned to an apostle. 

Notice, when Jesus took this great step forward, he 
did not leave behind his old life with his disciples. 
He chose out of the number of his disciples twelve, 
whom also he named apostles. They were to be dis- 
ciples still. They did not cease to be learners when 
he made them missionaries. The plant does not 
cease to feed itself out of the ground when it opens its 
glorious flowers for the world to see. All the more it 
needs supply, now that it has fulfilled its life. And 
so this great epoch in the Christian Church was an ad- 
dition, not a substitution. John, James, and Peter, 
were all the more devout disciples of the Master, filled 
themselves all the more eagerly with his truth and 
spirit, after they had become his apostles and were 
telling his truth to other men. 

And notice yet another thing. It is out of the 
very heart of the discipleship that the apostleship 
proceeds. It is the very best, the choicest, as we say, 



Disciples and Apostles, 155 

of the disciples, that are chosen to be apostles. This 
is apparent to any one who reads the story. Jesns 
calls all his disciples together, and out of them he 
chooses twelve. It is no inattentive idlers hang- 
ing on the outskirts of the group who listen to him, 
that he thinks good enough to go and carry his 
message. It is they who have listened to him long- 
est, and most intelligently, and most lovingly. It is 
Simon and Andrew his brother, James and John, 
Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas; it is 
men like these, the very heart and soul of the dis- 
cipleship whom he selects and calls apostles. And 
so it always is. Always it is the best of the inward 
life of anything, that which lies the closest to its 
heart and is the fullest of its spirit, which flowers in- 
to the outward impulse which comes to complete its 
life. It is the most truly thorough learning which 
by-and-by begins to be dissatisfied with its own 
learned luxury, and to desire that all men should 
have the chance of knowledge. It is the most true 
refinement that believes in the possible refinement 
even of the coarsest man. It is most intelligent ap- 
preciation of the blessings of free government which 
looks beyond the narrow walls of national pride and 
desires freedom and good government for all the 
world. I hold it to be one of the most beautiful and 
re-assuring facts in all the world that the purer and 
finer any good attainment grows, the more it comes 
into the necessity of expansiveness. It is the crude 
and half formed phases of any good growth which 
are selfish and exclusive. It is the half cultivated 



156 Disciples and Apostles. 

people who guard their feeble culture by arbitrary 
lines of separation. The heart of any good thing is 
catholic and expansive. It claims for itself the 
world. It longs to give itself away, and believes in 
the capacity of all men to receive it. This noble and 
true and beautiful truth, whose illustrations are ev- 
erywhere, was it not declared by Jesus, when out of 
the choicest heart of the group of his disciples, he 
selected his apostles ? 

Most deeply is this truth illustrated in the history 
of man's idea of God. It is the purest and loftiest 
and divinest thought of God that is most generous 
and world-embracing. Men dream of gods that are 
scarcely higher or better than themselves; gods 
stained with passion and with selfishness, and those 
gods do not care for men. The Lotos-eater pictures 
his gods like himself. He sees them in their selfish 
repose. 

" On the hills together, careless of mankind. 

For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurled 

Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curled 

Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleamy world ; 

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands, 

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and 

fiery sands, 
Clanging fights and flaming towns, and sinking ships and pray- 
ing hands. 
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song 
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, 
Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong." 

So sing the Lotos-eaters; then listen to Isaiah's 
song about his God: " He saw that there was no 
man, and wondered that there was no Intercessor; 



Disciples and Apostles. 157 

therefore His own arm brought salvation." By as much 
more as He is purer and holier, by just so much more 
is He larger, less able to rest in His own satisfaction, 
more compelled to go and help the poor sons of men ; 
and so it is out of the heart of the holiest conception 
of deity that the Incarnation comes. 

Shall we not then set down as absolutely funda- 
mental in oar study of the Christian Church, this re- 
lationship between the disciple life and the apostle 
life, that is, between the inward and the outward im- 
pulse ? In the life of every parish this relationship 
ought to be recognized. The failure to recognize it 
is what makes so many of our parishes very far from 
what they ought to be, keeps them uneasy with a 
constant doubt of themselves, and a continual sense 
that they are suspected by the world outside. What 
is a church or parish for ? What is the meaning of 
this little company gathered out of a great commun- 
ity, which meets in this building, for instance, stated- 
ly, Sunday after Sunday, year after year? No doubt 
they are, in the first place, learners, disciples, stu- 
dents together of the truth of God, listeners at the 
lips of the Master for his revelations. But unless there 
is continually issuing from the heart of their disciple- 
ship a true apostleship, unless the best souls among 
them keep fresh and live the outward impulse, the 
consciousness that their church and they exist not 
for themselves alone but for the world, how their 
church life grows dead. 

Those of you who have loved the church longest 
and most dcarlv, will bear me witness that there is 



158 Disciples and Apostles. 

always an inward, self-enclosing tendency to be re- 
sisted by every congregation. Very often the 
more the congregation wakes up to earnest life, 
this inward tendency asserts its strength. Given 
its full sweep, it would make the congregation a 
club, existing for high ends indeed, but existing 
for its own benefit alone. It would make the 
pew as exclusive and private a piece of property 
as the parlor. It would judge the way in which 
its work was being done by the way in which those 
few selected people were becoming wiser and bet- 
ter men and women. If it admitted outsiders at 
all, they would come in simply as spectators of that 
process of culture which was going on. It would be 
a church of disciples. It is a constant effort, I say, 
requiring continual watchfulness both in minister 
and people, to see that an earnest church does not 
come to this, to see that it is kept apostolic, with 
the outward consciousness always alive, knowing 
that it exists not for its pewholders, but for the com- 
munity; for just as many of the human race as it 
possibly can reach; knowing that its pewholders 
will get the best good out of it the more completely 
they can feel, the more manifestly they can show, that 
they feel that it is in no real sense their church. It is 
first God's church, and then the church of all or any 
of God's children. I cannot help saying how truly I 
believe that this apostolic consciousness is present in 
this congregation. God grant it may increase and deep- 
en till our church shall never cease to feel, through 
all the satisfaction of its own life, the life of every poor 



Disciples and Apostles. 159 

godless creature on the rich streets or the wretched 
streets of Boston, as a mother never loses the feeling 
of her reprobate son, half round the world, though 
for the moment she can do nothing for him. 

But if we look not at a congregation, but at the 
best and most growing human lives, I think that this 
relationship between their outward and their inward 
tendency falls into a certain sort of system, which is 
continually repeated. It is a sort of pulse, which 
we can feel beating as w T e stand with our finger on 
the heart. Every life which comes to its best begins 
with a sort of loose expansiveness; it is drawn in- 
ward till it reaches an almost selfish concentration ; 
then it opens with a larger and finer movement to 
embrace mankind. This, it seems to me, is the nor- 
mal and healthy course of any character. There is 
an illustration in the history of these twelve men 
who were with Jesus. Think what they must have 
been before they knew their Master. The open life 
of free and thoughtless young men, they must have 
lived, easily making friends, easily entering into 
everybody's superficial interests because they had 
only superficial feelings of their own, liking to be 
liked, and full of ready sympathies. Then they met 
Jesus. They were drawn away to him. By him 
they were drawn in upon themselves. To know 
him, and to know their own deeper lives in him, be- 
came their longing. They must have been missed 
from their old haunts in Capernaum. They must 
have passed their old companions almost like stran- 
gers on the street. Their lives were folded in upon 



160 Disciples and Apostles. 

themselves, and upon him who was at the centre of 
each. But by-and-by a new power began to work 
at the enfolded heart. He who had drawn them in 
upon himself, began to send them abroad. Another 
kind of love for their old friends, and all the world 
whom those friends represented, came to them. They 
began to be seen again upon the streets. They be- 
gan to find out once more their old companions. Only 
now they are preaching. Now they are telling 
every one of the new life. Now the power of expan- 
siveness is not their own careless good fellowship ; 
it is the eager soul-craving grace of Jesus Christ. 
They have been drawn in from the world upon him, 
that he might send them out, full of himself, into the 
w x orld. 

That is a picture of every Christian life which works 
itself out to its completeness. There is the first easy 
instinctive human brotherhood; there is the drawing 
in and retirement of the nature on itself, with any 
strong experience, most of all with the strongest of 
all experiences, the occupation of the soul by Christ; 
then there is the large expansion of the strengthened 
soul, as it longs for the complete society, the brother- 
hood with man in God. It is the beating of the 
great spiritual pulse. It is the systole and diastole 
of the heart of a whole man's history. It is the suc- 
cession of man's fellowship with man, man's disciple- 
ship to Christ, man's apostleship to men for Christ, 
succeeding one another. 

Here is a man in our company who to-day, with 
light-hearted, careless indifference, is the easy friend 



Disciples and Apostles. 161 

of everybody whom he meets. He welcomes all who 
give themselves to him ; he gives himself to anybody; 
because to give and take is such a shallow thing that 
it makes no impression. His intercourses are of that 
surface sort which do not get down to where men 
are really different from one another, and so he easily 
consorts with whomsoever he may meet. He feels 
no deep needs in himself, and so anybody satisfies 
him. And now to that man comes some revelation. 
Perhaps he enters the deep water of some great sor- 
row or some overwhelming joy. Perhaps he is swept 
into the irresistible current of some absorbing study. 
Perhaps, greatest of all, that in which all the others 
find their only worthy completion, he is drawn into 
the bosom of the realized love of God by the strong 
arm of Christ his Saviour. What is, what must be 
the first sign of that great thing which has come to 
pass ? A silence falling on the noisy communicative- 
ness, a turning inward that they may watch the won- 
drous work within the soul of those eyes which have 
been wholly busy in seeing the quick kaleidoscopic 
changes of the things outside, a loosening of every 
other grasp, that the hold on the new friend may be 
complete. Men will stand round and lament almost 
as if they mourned for the dead. " How he has gone 
from us ! How his life, which used to lie all plain and 
open, is hidden. And where ? We cannot tell ! He 
says, With Christ in God. We do not know. But 
evidently he is gone from us." So they stand round 
him and lament. But by-and-by, strangely but cer- 
tainly, they become aware that he is coming back to 
11 



1 62 Disciples and Apostles. 

them; and coming far more richly, with far more 
close and generous and tender giving of himself to 
them, than in those old and careless days. Behold 
now all that he has is theirs. He loves them with 
a new love. He honors them with a new honor. He 
looks into their faces as if he saw behind each of 
them another face, which shone through theirs and 
gave to their sordidness its dignity and value. Where 
he used to open his arms to them, now he opens his 
heart. Where he once gave them his counsel, or his 
purse, now he gives them himself. Out of the re- 
tirement has come a new companionship. The pulse 
of the life has once more beat outward, and to the 
contraction this new expansion has succeeded. 

It may be that this pulsation will go on and repeat 
itself again and again. It may be that some new 
revelation of truth will draw the soul once more in 
upon itself, but the glory of the true Christian life 
will be that it always reacts more vigorously out- 
ward for every new self-feeding upon Christ. This 
is its legitimate and healthy movement. Disciple- 
ship and apostleship are the pulsations of the Christ- 
ian heart. They feed each other. Nay, why may 
we not look higher still, and when in the myste- 
rious vision, which yet for all its mystery is true, we 
see Jesus standing forth full of the holiness of eter- 
nity, and saying, l ' Lo, I come," in answer to a needy 
world's cry for help, why should we not recognize 
that, for the divine as well as for the human, for 
God as well as man, there is a necessity that the 
inward completeness should utter itself in outward 



Disciples and Apostles. 16 



o 



communication; that the best which the soul is in 
itself, should be turned towards and poured upon 
whatever other soul may need it anywhere ? 

And now we have only to pass up from the indi- 
vidual to the race, and see how the same law which, 
we have been tracing applies there too. There too 
we have these same three stages in the intercourse 
of man with man, and in their succession lies the his- 
tory of the Christian Church, which can never be, 
ought never to be, considered as something apart 
from the history of humanity at large, but simply as 
the heart of human history, its centre, its ideal, work- 
ing out in type or pattern what must ultimately be 
the destiny of all. What are the stages ? First 
there is the natural aggregation and companionship 
of man, the instinct for society, that which makes 
tribes and states and families, that which inspires 
the self-sacrificing fellowship of which savage history 
gives us some glimpses, and of which poets love to 
sing, glorifying far off barbarian islands as if the 
romance and the heroism of friendship belonged to 
them, and almost necessarily died out as soon as 
their barbarian simplicity was invaded by civilization. 
No doubt this is not wholly poetry. No doubt 
there is a certain spontaneousness of human inter- 
course which belongs most naturally to the rudest 
and simplest conditions of life. With culture comes 
reserve. With the teaching of spiritual religion 
comes the emphasis of the single life and the clear 
demarkation of that group among mankind which is 
called the Church. The world lingers long in this 



164 Disciples and Apostles. 

stage. The Church accepts exchisiveness and limita- 
tion as her law and principle of life. But gradually, 
as she fills out her life more and more, she becomes 
aware of a new impulse. She begins to press on her 
own borders. She begins to see in the distance a new 
fellowship of man, a great deal clearer because a 
great deal deeper and more reasonable than the old. 
The easy brotherhood of savage life shows but 
poorly beside the great fellowship in Christ which is 
to fill the New Jerusalem. To the bringing about 
of that fellowship the Church by-and-by consecrates 
itself, accepting the missionary impulse as the only 
complete fulfilment of its life. 

I am sure, my dear friends, that this is the only 
true conception of the relationship between the 
notion of culture and the notion of missions in the 
Christian Church. The notion of culture is prepara- 
tory to the notion of missions. The men and women 
in a Christian land, in a Christian congregation, who 
are consciously growing wiser, braver, purer, stron- 
ger by their share in the worship of a Christian 
Church, are on the way to a great unselfish conception 
of life, in which the bravery, • comfort, purity and 
strength of their brethren anywhere in the world, 
shall be dear to them by the same motive of love to 
Christ and desire for the progress of his kingdom, 
which makes their own soul-life dear. Unless their 
spiritual culture finds its culmination in that craving 
for the spread of truth and the saving of men's souls, 
it is a thoroughly unsatisfactory thing. And yet, 
what do we see ? Merely to look at it on the small- 



Disciples and Apostles. 165 

est scale, I have seen people standing outside of this 
congregation of ours, restrained from full entrance 
into the circle of its life by the natural, the inevita- 
ble necessities which limit the range of any one 
congregation, complaining of the exclusion, unreas- 
onably finding fault with the exclusiveness of those 
who were its members. By-and-by, in time, the way 
is opened for them to become part of our body, to have 
their regular place among us, and all the incidental 
privileges of our organization. And more than 
once I have seen those very persons become the 
most exclusive, the least willing to welcome some 
new comer to the fellowship into which they them- 
selves have found their way. It is the everlastingly 
recurring tendency to rest in the stage of discipleship 
and to refuse to cross the line into apostleship. There 
could be no better description than that of the 
indisposition of the faithful, constant, devout and 
thoughtful worshipper to believe in, to give his heart 
and his money to foreign missions. Discipleship, but 
not apostleship for him ! And yet the one is woful- 
ly incomplete without the other. The one trying to 
live without the other, shows an inherent lack in the 
fundamental qualities of faithin God and faith in man, 
which are what the Christian religion really means. 
This is the real sadness of the position which 
one often hears taken by the earnest, devout and 
conscientious members of the Church at home. 
They say that they do not believe in foreign mis- 
sions. The sadness is nut simply that in Africa or 
China darkness is to be left in some little region 



1 66 Disciples and Apostles, 

where they might send light. It is that they declare 
the imperfectness of their own faith ; that they 
frankly say that either they do not believe that God 
can do for other men what he is doing every day for 
them, or else they do not believe that those other 
men are capable of receiving from God those bless- 
ings of the higher life which they are taking from 
him constantly — the lack of faith in God or the lack 
of faith in man. And yet to have those two faiths, 
and to grow richer in them constantly, is what it 
means to be a Christian. It is not the desire to en- 
force the argument of a Foreign Missionary sermon, 
it is the sincere and deep conviction of my soul, 
when I declare that if the Christian faith does not 
culminate and complete itself in the effort to make 
Christ known to all the world, that faith appears to 
me to be a thoroughly unreal and insignificant 
thing, destitute of power for the single life, and in- 
capable of being convincingly proved to be true. 

But I have dwelt long enough, perhaps too long, 
upon this general plea for the essential apostleship 
of Christianity. I want to address myself, in the few 
moments which I may yet occupy, to the peculiar as- 
pect which the mission of our religion to the world 
presents in these especial modern times in which we 
live. A great deal of what is said concerning For- 
eign Missions always seems to me to take for grant- 
ed a state of things which has long passed away, and 
to ignore the condition into which the world and 
Christian thought have passed to-day, and into which 
they are more and more fully entering. Men who 



Disciples and Apostles. 167 

are earnestly, almost blatantly, progressive in other 
things, are centuries behind the times in this. For 
the world has changed. With its new rapidity of 
communication, with the intermingling of its races, 
with the careful study of one part by another part, 
with the disposition of the weaker races to seek re- 
lations of protection and dependence with the strong- 
er, it is simply impossible that every nation, every 
race should keep its own religion uninvaded, uninflu- 
enced by any other. The practical issue of all the 
present tendency of human life must be that the best 
thought of the world will overcome the worse 
thought. There must come a natural selection of 
religions, a survival of the fittest among faiths. No 
longer can a range of mountains restrain two ideas 
of God away from any contact or comparison with 
one another. No longer can an ocean shut a bar- 
barous superstition out of all knowledge of a bright, 
pure, enlightened belief, that blesses men upon the oth- 
er side. The winds that pulsate with all other mes- 
sages, will not be silent concerning the good news 
which all hearts need. The waters that are no long- 
er walls but bridges, will be trodden by the invisible 
feet of Faith. To dream to-day of that which old 
Kome dreamed, when, looking over her vast domain, 
she saw each subject race keeping its own faith, pro- 
vided only that all the gods and oracles would teach 
unquestioning loyalty to Caesar ; to think that it is 
possible that all the nations of the earth should live 
under their separate religions, provided only that 
each religion should uphold the modern king-ideas 



1 68 Disciples and Apostles. 

of personal rights, of open trade and of international 
obligations, that is the most hopeless backward vis- 
ion that lingers behind the closed eyelids of any 
blind conservatism. The early Christians set out 
from Csesarea and walked with simple, trustful feet 
right through that vain dream of old Kome. The 
modern Christian is found halting and helpless be- 
fore the far more empty vision that haunts our half- 
awakened Christianity. 

And if the world has changed, so too has Christi- 
anity itself undergone changes which ought, to any 
man that understands them, to illuminate the possi- 
bility of the conversion of the world to Christ. What 
are they ? Compare the religion in which you were 
brought up, O my religious friend of forty years, and 
tell me 1 There surely is a difference. You will not 
talk to your children wholly as your parents talked 
to you. The notion of conversion is a more intelli- 
gible thing. The tests of the new life are more dis- 
tinctly those which may be known and read of all 
men. The conception of personality in religion, of 
the necessary difference of every man's religious life 
from every other's, has won an almost exaggerated 
prominence. And in the stress of criticism and of 
unbelief, the Christian faith has been compelled to 
realize herself, to know what truly is a part of her 
and what is accidental. She is like a ship at sea, in 
hard and furious weather, which has taken in every- 
thing that is ornamental, which she carried easily 
and almost thought she could not sail without when 
the skies were fair, and is sailing now through the 



Disciples and Apostles. 169 

tempest with all herself, hut nothing hut herself; 
strong in her restored simplicity to go through 
storm and hurricane. This is what the Christian 
faith is to-day, and is more and more becoming, the 
simple loyalty to Jesus Christ, the cordial wish to 
see every man's and every race's faith develope into 
its own type of life, the knowledge that each man's 
new life is his old life, his ideal life ; that every man's 
conversion is but the re-entrance into the first plan of 
God, for which he was made. My friends, there never 
has been a religion so made for all the world as that. 
Our own dear faith has never, since she stood tiptoe 
with St. Paul upon the shore of Troas, ready to cross 
over into Europe, has never since then stood so ready 
for her work, " with loins girt up to run around the 
earth." It is the meeting of these two conditions 
of our century that makes the friend of missions 
hope. The opening world, the simplifying faith ! 
Stanley penetrates to the centre of the dark conti- 
nent, and when he comes out he has left there, in the 
hands of King Mtesa, the despotic ruler over two 
million people, as a kind of epitomized Bible, a board 
on which the fascinated, half-converted savage has 
had written in Arabic, that he may daily read them, 
the Ten Commandments of Moses, the Lord's Prayer, 
and the command of Jesus, " Thou shalt love thy 
neighbor as thyself." The opened world — the simpli- 
fied faith ! Surely this of all times is not the time to 
disbelieve in Foreign Missions; surely he who de- 
spairs of the power of the Gospel to convert the world 



170 Disciples and Apostles. 

to-day, despairs of the noontide just when the sunrise 
is breaking out of twilight on the earth. 

I think again that it is wonderful how many peo- 
ple who understand perfectly what the Gospel is, in 
the work that it does for them, are all wrong in their 
conception of what the Gospel has to do for the 
world, and so have false conceptions about the whole 
possibility of missions. They talk as if what the re- 
ligion of Jesus had to do, was to go a perfect stran- 
ger into a dark land, with whose people it had before 
had no concern, to cast out everything that they had 
ever believed, to falsify all their hopes, to begin their 
life all over. Perhaps they thought the same thing 
once about themselves. Perhaps they stood for 
years untouched by Christianity, because Christian- 
ity seemed to them to be the utter destruction of all 
that they had ever been, or thought, or hoped. 
They could not understand it. It was all strange 
and foreign to them. But by-and-by Christ really 
came, and lo, he was the revealer of that old life. 
He purified that old self; but it was it still, purified 
and saved, that he set up to be the burden of their 
thanksgiving. The old hopes were enlightened ; the 
old ignorant prayers were fulfilled. It was as when 
the Apostles went out and cried up and down Judea, 
" The Messiah has come,'' and Judea understood it- 
self It was as when Paul stood on Mars Hill, and 
cried, " Whom you ignorantly worship, Him declare 
I unto you ; " and the altar to the unknown God burst 
for the first time into the bright blaze of an intelligent 
sacrifice. And that is what the Christian religion, 



Disciples and Apostles. 171 

fulfilling its missionary duty, has to do for all the 
world. It is the great interpreter of the religious 
heart of man. Its manifested God speaks, and the 
divine voices throughout all the world become in- 
telligible. Its message is declared, and countless 
oracles that were all blind, win a clear meaning. Its 
sacrifice is held up, and the heathen altar drops its 
veil of superstition, and discerns its own long lost 
intention. Its Son of Man goes with his gracious 
footsteps through the hosts of heathen barbarians, and 
their sonship to God leaps into consciousness and life. 
Not as the rival, but as the mother of them all, so 
does she stand, harmonizing them with her presence 
and drawing all that is good and true of them into 
herself. 

If that be her function and her right, then it is no 
unreasonable and bootless task. It is what Jesus did 
for Judaism. It is what Peter did for Cornelius. It 
is what some faith must some day do for all the par- 
tial and corrupt and rival faiths of men. I could not 
believe in my own dear faith, the sweet, pure, strong 
faith of Christ, if I did not believe that to her and to 
no other belonged that glorious privilege. 

Ah, my dear friends, my people, there is the final 
truth about it, from which we cannot get away. We 
cannot believe in our Christ for ourselves, unless we 
believe in him for all the world. The more deeply 
we believe in him for ourselves, the more certain we 
shall be that he is the Saviour of the world. K. 
deeper personal faith, a more complete discipleship, 
that is what you want. Have that, and the apostle- 



172 Disciples and Apostles. 

ship must come. If there is any part of your life not 
wholly consecrated to him, if there is any of his love 
which you have not appropriated, if there is any un- 
done duty, which, as you do it, will open for you a 
new door into his heart, if there is any word, by 
speaking which you can commit yourself more utter- 
ly to him ; just as surely as in any of these ways 
you deepen your own spiritual life and make Jesus 
more your Saviour, just so surely you will believe in 
Foreign Missions, and long to tell all men that he is 
their Saviour too. 



SERMON X. 

A FOREIGN MISSIONARY SERMON. 

" The heavens, even the heavens are the Lord's : hid the earth hath 
he given to the children of men." — Psalm cxv. 16. 

TO-DAY we stand upon the summit of our priv- 
ileges and look abroad upon our duties. It is as 
if we sat with Jesus by the well at Sychar and 
heard him say, " Lift up your eyes and look on 
the fields, for they are white already to the harvest." 
We are to think of Foreign Missions. And the 
words which have suggested the line of thought 
which I want to ask you to pursue, are these striking 
words of David. 

The heavens and the earth are set in contrast 
with each other. The heavens with their sun and 
moon and stars, their wandering winds, their majes- 
tic domes and pinnacles and fields of cloud, their 
mysteries of rain and dew, of frost and snow; and. 
then the earth, with its familiar cities and forests 
and corn-fields, its homes of men and women, its 

seas and rivers, its sports and toils, its friendships 

173 



1 74 The Earth of the Redemption. 

and kinships, these stand over against each other. 
vVnd their contrast is in this — that while the heav- 
ens are out of the reach of man, the expression and 
result of forces which he cannot control, the earth 
is what man makes it. He is the changing power 
here. He turns the rivers where he will, and makes 
the forests give place to gardens, and builds the cities 
where the lions used to roar. Over his head all the 
while stretch the great mysterious heavens, some 
times all calmness, sometimes all tumult, sending 
their influences down to him, but out of reach of any 
influence of his. " The heavens, even the heavens are 
the Lord's. The earth hath he given to the children 
of men." 

It is the familiar contrast which is always present 
and always having its effect upon our life. The 
earth and life upon the earth are never the same 
things that they would be if the great heaven did 
not stretch, mysterious and unattainable, above them. 
Man, great as his power grows upon the earth, is 
always kept aware of how limited his power is. 
There is always the heaven above him, which is not 
his, but God's. And this becomes a figure of the 
limit of man's power everywhere. Not to create 
first principles or truths, nor to change them in any 
way, but only to apply them, to set them at work 
upon the material of life, this is the limited preroga- 
tive of man. Not to call into being the highest 
powers, but only to open the lower regions of nature 
to their influence, as the farmer opens the earth to 
the sunshine and the rain, this is our human work. 



The Earth of the Redemption. 175 

So David's verse has in it the lofty description of the 
great philosophy of the universe, to the knowledge 
of which mankind gradually arrives, that the source 
of all power is beyond man's reach, and that the 
place of man is just to furnish in his faithful and 
obedient life a medium through which the power 
that is in the heavens may descend and work upon 
the earth. 

For evidently when David says that God has 
" given the earth to the children of men," he cannot 
mean that it has been given away from those eternal 
plans and purposes of goodness which God must 
always keep with reference to all His creation. If 
we had any such thought as that we should only 
need another verse of the same David to set us right. 
In the twenty-fourth psalm he sings, "The earth is 
the Lord's and the fulness thereof ; the round w^orld 
and they that dwell therein." In w T hatever sense 
then it is true that God has given the earth to man, 
it is not true in any sense which Avould imply that it 
had ceased to be God's world, that He had given it 
away from Himself, out of His oversight or out of 
those purposes of righteousness and holiness vdrich 
are in the very substance of His nature. It is God's 
world still. It has been given to man not absolutely, 
but in trust, that man may work out in it the will of 
God ; given — may we not say ? — -just as a father gives 
a child a corner of his great garden, and says, 
" There, that is yours; now cultivate it." Still there 
lies the father's great garden with its orderly beds 
and rich flowers, which is the child's pattern in all 



ij6 The Earth of the Redemption. 

that he tries to do. Nay, to the father's great garden 
the child must go to get the slips and seeds for 
his own soil; and when the summer comes it is 
by the standard of the father's great garden that 
the success or failure of the boy's gardening must 
be judged. That is the way in which God has 
given the earth to man ; not to be played with 
for our own pleasure, but to be worked for Him. 

You know how full the parables of Jesus are of 
this idea. "A certain householder planted a vine- 
yard, and let it out to husbandmen." " A man travel- 
ling into a far country, called his servants and de- 
livered unto them his goods." " Give me the por- 
tion of goods that falleth to me," says the younger 
son to the father. " And he divided unto them his 
living," runs the story. Everywhere the notion is 
of entrust men t. 

Here is the fundamental difference in the lives of 
men. Man finds the world in his hands. He can do 
with it what he will. Oh how obedient it is, how 
docile, and how plastic ! He makes the fields his 
slaves, and bids them fill his barns and load his table. 
He makes the hills his treasuries and calls upon their 
silver and their gold to glorify his life. He says to 
the river, "Feed me," to the ocean, "Carry me;" to 
the subtle powers of the air, "Give me your light." 
Everywhere the world is his. But everywhere the 
difference of men lies here, in whether this mastery 
seems to be absolute, or whether it seems to be a 
trust. Absolute mastery means self-indulgence. Its 
reckless fruits are everywhere, in arrogance and inso- 



The Earth of the Redemption. 177 



lence, in " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes 
and the pride of life." The mastery of trust means 
humility, conscientiousness, elevation, charity, the 
fear of God and love of man. These are the two 
great types of strength which fill the earth — the 
Cassars and Napoleons claiming the earth for them- 
selves, and subduing it to their proud wills — the 
Pauls and Bonifaces and Xaviers and Elliots and 
Livingstons, claiming the earth for holiness, and sub- 
duing it to the will of God. 

And now it is in connection with this higher and 
true view of the giving of the world by God to 
man that the coming of Christ into the world gains 
its true meaning. " God was in Christ reconciling 
the world unto himself" What do these words 
of the great apostle mean? Think of it! Here 
was God's world given to man to keep, to use, 
to work for God. Here was man, always falling into 
the temptation to think the gift of trust an absolute 
gift. And here the Giver came with clear assurance 
of himself; making the men who saw him know that 
it was he ; touching the earth which was his own 
with a wise power that called out from it capacities 
which the poor tenant never had discovered ; not 
taking it back out of man's keeping, but making 
himself man, so that all men might see what it might 
really mean for man to keep and use and work the 
earth of God; so God came to his world. 

Could anything be more effectual than that? It 

was as if the maker of a great instrument had given 

it into the keeping of a pupil of his who, losing the 
12 



1 78 The Earth of the Redemption. 

knowledge of what mysterious and mighty harmonies 
were hidden in the subtle mechanism, had degraded 
it to low employment and played upon it only danc- 
ing ditties and sensuous melodies. By-and-by the 
master comes into the pupil's house. He lays his fin- 
gers on the keys. He wakes the organ's sleeping 
heart. The wakened instrument responds, and for a 
moment men hear the great revelation of its nature. 
There is the redemption of the organ. Just exactly 
such was Christ's redemption of the world. It was a 
true man; all the truer man because it was God in 
man ; it was the Father in the Son who showed what 
earth, used in the fear of God, might be. In him there 
could be no doubt of what sort had been the giving 
of the earth to the children of men of which David 
had sung so long ago. It could not for one moment 
seem to have been a gift to man's self-indulgence 
and selfishness. It certainly had not been a giving 
of the earth away from God. It had been given to 
the divine in man, to that in man which had in it 
the nature of divinity, and which was capable, by 
obedience, of becoming infinitely near to God. It 
was the gift of trust from a Father to his child, in 
which the given thing is all the more the Father's 
when it has been given to the child who is true part 
of the Father. That this is the real nature of God's 
gift of earth to man, was the assertion of the incar- 
nation and of all the life of Jesus. 

I hope you see that this is no slight distinction. 
It lies at the bottom of all man's life upon the earth. 
Shall he make the earth the kingdom of God, or the 



The Earth of the Redemption. 1 79 

kingdom of his own selfishness ? Christ stands in 
the midst of all the tumult of human history and 
says to men, "After this manner pray ye. Our 
Father who art in heaven. Thy kingdom come. Thy 
will be done on earth as it is in heaven." The divine 
character of human life is asserted wherever that 
prayer is prayed. The brutal vices and the cultiva- 
ted frivolities of men, the cruelties, and wrongs, and 
injustices of man to man, the stupefying of men's 
souls by self-indulgence, the lusts and hatred which 
make so much of the earth so wretched, all of these 
are declared to be intruders ; not merely ungodly 
but inhuman ; not the natural but the unnatural de- 
velopment of man's life upon the earth, wherever the 
true nature of God's gift of earth to man is set forth 
by the life and word of Jesus. 

It is within this great general purpose that all the 
special personal works which Christ does for men 
are included. He forgives the sins of souls that are 
penitent. It is that they may be able to take the 
world which God has given them and live in it as 
His, full of the profound est gratitude which a soul can 
feel. He comforts sufferers in sorrow. It is that by 
one more avenue they may understand his love, and 
so bring loving hearts to the understanding of this 
earthly life, and find it full of him. He sets before 
men the promise of eternal glory. It is that this life 
may be glorilied by the anticipated radiance of the 
perfect life to which it leads. Forgiveness, consola- 
tion, the promised heaven, none of them has its com- 
plete and final purpose in itself. The ultimate pur- 



1 80 The Earth of the Redemption. 

pose of all is present character; the man, here and 
now, living the redeemed life in the redeemed world, 
offering in all his godly use of it the world which 
God has given him to God. This was what Christ 
asserted and made possible. 

And now, what has all this to do with foreign 
missions? Do you not see? The world is God's 
world, given by Him to man for man to use in obe- 
dience to God. Man has taken the world, but he 
has largely forgotten that it is his in trust, and has 
used it largely as if it were absolutely his. Yet 
everywhere misgivings and vague reminiscences of 
the true nature of the gift remain. These constitute 
the never fixed but never wholly perishing religious 
life of man. Now into this world God comes in 
Christ to redeem it to Himself, as I have been trying 
to describe. That coming takes place at one cer- 
tain point. We can see I suppose two reasons for 
that. One reason was that if it were to be a gen- 
uine Incarnation, an actual utterance of the divine 
life in a special human body, there was a natural 
necessity that for that body there should be a fixed 
locality upon the earth. There must be a Holy 
Land. There must be a Bethlehem, and a Jerusalem 
where the actual feet of the Incarnate God should 
walk. The other reason, no doubt, was that this new 
wonder was to follow the principle of all God's won- 
derful communications, like the communication of 
light and the communication of truth, which never 
flash in simultaneous splendor through a whole at- 
mosphere at once, but always pass by degrees, how- 



The Earth of the Redemption. 181 



ever rapidly, from particle to particle in a communicat- 
ing medium which itself is glorified and educated by 
the passage. At one point then this Revelation 
comes, this Christ appears. But evidently that one 
point is but an incident. The fact which he comes 
to establish, the consciousness which he comes to 
renew, is one that belongs to all the earth. It is as 
true among the snows of Greenland and in the jungles 
of the tropics as upon the rocky plateau of Moriah 
and the green shores of Tiberias, that the earth is 
man's only as man is God's. The tidings must of 
necessity fail upon the earth as the sun must of ne- 
cessity strike the planet first upon some one most 
exposed mountain top, but the mountain top knows 
that the sun is not for it alone, but for the world; and 
instantly it is calling to the other hill tops and to 
the deep valleys. Or, shall we say, in homelier 
metaphor, it is as if a father sends his message to the 
household of his children, and one child takes the 
message at the door, not the best child by any cer- 
tainty, not by any certainty the child most capable 
of understanding what the message means, but just 
perhaps the child who stands the nearest to the 
door. And then the moment that that child has it 
in his hand, he knows that it is not for him alone, and 
calls out to his brothers, "Come and hear." That is the 
simple genesis of foreign missions, and its principle 
always remains the same. The circle widens from 
its first centre. New circles with new centres form, 
but still so long as there is any child in the whole 
house who has not heard the father's message, the 



1 82 The Earth of the Redemption, 

impulse and the sense of duty live. The desire to 
let the whole redeemed world know of its redemp- 
tion, moves in the heart of every man vividly con- 
scious of the redemption in himself. 

And what will be the result of such a telling of 
the true nature of God's gift of the world to man ? 
We cannot fail to know beforehand. That part of 
the world which wants to use the world selfishly 
and basely, will reject the story, and perhaps will 
kill the man who tells it. That part of the world 
which has been dissatisfied with its attempt to make 
the world a mere scene of self-indulgence, but which 
has not been able to conceive for it any great con- 
sistent purpose, will be dazed and. bewildered by 
such a vast story as this which the incarnation tells, 
that all man's life, and the earth where it is lived, be- 
longs to God. But wherever any preservation of the 
world's first idea has been kept, it will be brought 
out to meet this declaration in which it will recog- 
nize at once a kinship to itself. Men and religions 
in whom has lingered and struggled some knowl- 
edge of the sacredness of human life and of the pos- 
sibility of man, how they will gather around the mis- 
sionary truth of Christ and say, ' k Yes, we have been 
sure that somehow we and our earth belonged to 
God: behold how we have tried to utter that assur- 
ance. This is what our poor altar means. Nay, this 
is what these very idols meant at first, which have 
since then become such wretched stumbling blocks. 
We know that we and our earth have belonged to 
God. Has he indeed come to claim us? Tell us 



The Earth of the Redemption. 183 

about it." Is it not just what I said? Brother ask- 
ing of brother what is the message which the Father 
has sent to the whole family, but which has fallen 
into one child's hands before the rest ! 

I think there can hardly be conceived a picture 
of any more gracious and beautiful relation between 
man and his fellow-man than is involved in such a 
thought of missionary work as this. There is no 
arrogance about the missionary preacher or the mis- 
sionary nation that so thinks about the missionary 
work. It is not Moses standing superior to the 
cringing multitude, insulting their thirst with the 
parade of his power to give or to refuse the water: 
" Hear now, ye rebels, must we bring you water out 
of this rock ? " Such missionary insolence and con- 
tempt for the heathen there may sometimes have 
been. This is not that. Rather it is the exquisite and 
noble honor for the souls it speaks to, which fills all 
the rest of the history of Moses beside that one un- 
happy outbreak. You remember the profound re- 
spect with which the great messenger of God again 
and again speaks of His Israel. " For they are thy 
people and thine inheritance." So he pleads with God. 
So must Christendom think and speak of heathenism ; 
so it will think and speak of heathenism when it has 
caught the true idea of the message of redemption 
which it has to carry. 

We have been talking about the work which 
Christendom has to do for heathenism, as the carry- 
ing of a message ; and we speak of it rightly so. Only, 
in order to get the fullest understanding of this mat- 



184 The Earth of the Redemption. 

ter, we must remember what God's messages are, and 
what it is to carry them. One of the lessons which 
we learn in our own Christian life at home is that 
God's messages are not mere facts, to be given and 
received by the mere statement of their terms. God's 
messages which he has sent to us, have always been 
full truths, which were not ours until our whole na- 
ture had received them. Only when they had pos- 
sessed each part of us, our hearts, our tastes, our 
consciences, our intellects, did they become really 
ours. Now we must know that in the same complete 
way we are to give to the heathen what God has given 
us. Only as full grown truth, not as mere bare fact, we 
are to give the gospel to the heathen. Preaching 
the gospel to the heathen is not standing upon the 
beach of a dark continent and crying into the dark- 
ness the story of the Lord. It is nothing less, no- 
thing easier, than laying upon all the heathen nature, 
upon body and soul and mind and conscience and 
ordinary habits, all together, the truth of the redeemed 
world as it has been laid upon all our nature in all 
our Christian culture. That is the reason why the 
missionary colleges in China aud in India, and the 
medical missions with their hospital where the poor 
bring their sick bodies to be healed, and the mission- 
aries' homes with their living pictures of Christian 
family life, are as true and legitimate a part of our 
missionary power as are the churches where the mis- 
sionaries preach. Philanthropy and education have 
come in these modern times to take a very promi- 
nent place in missionary operations, not because 



The Earth of the Redemption. 185 

they were needed in addition to religion, but be- 
cause they were part of the complete religion, be- 
cause the full truth of Christ must reach the whole 
nature of man through the whole nature of man, or 
the true Gospel was not preached. What wonder also 
if sometimes, since, as we have seen, the Gospel looks 
for recognition to a consciousness already present in 
the soul of man, it should be able to attain that rec- 
ognition the more readily, if knocking first at the 
outermost and easiest doors of physical necessity 
and intellectual curiosity, it seeks through them a 
gradual approach to the chamber where the power 
of the deepest faith resides, and so philanthropy 
and education should be at first most prominent in 
the missionary work. It is so with the heathen man 
among us here, and there is no reason why it should 
not be so also with the heathen man across the sea. 
There are two principal objections which in these 
days rise in men's minds, with every thought of For- 
eign Missions. One is the excellence of the heathen 
and the other is the imperfection of Christians. I 
cannot but think that both of these objections dis- 
appear, if such an idea of Foreign Missions as I have 
tried to set before you this morning is thoroughly 
understood. What shall we say about the first diffi- 
culty? You know how common it is. When we 
talk of going to tell men in heathen lands the story 
of the revelation of God in Christ, we are reminded 
that they know very much of God already. " They 
are not Godless," we are told. Their sacred books 
are opened, the holy lives of their best men are pic- 



1 86 The Earth of the Redeinption. 

tured, and the whole power of their present knowl- 
edge of heaven, of the Deity, and of the soul, seems 
to be set as an objection in the way of their chance 
of receiving the fuller light which Christianity 
claims to be ready to bestow. Now, grant, for the 
moment, the whole force of the objection, just as it is 
stated, and yet see how powerless it is. If Chris- 
tianity were set forth as man's only way of knowing 
anything about God, it might indeed be puzzling to 
the missionary, when he came to his heathen land, to 
iind a great deal of the knowledge of God there al- 
ready. But if Christianity be what we have pictured, 
a redemption, a bringing back and reclaiming for 
God of an earth which has always belonged to Him, 
then surely the messenger of that redemption will 
not be surprised, but only devoutly thankful when 
he finds some consciousness of that belonging of the 
earth to God awaiting him wherever he goes. No 
land so dark that there is not some such light there ! 
No brutal savagedom so savage that, in some breast 
of nobler sort, or, it may be, kept only in some fan- 
tastic rite whose spiritual meaning has long been 
lost, there is not uttered some sort of craving for the 
true nobility of ser/antship to God, of stewardship 
for earth. T here can be no grudging of any such 
illumination. Christianity has not got to explain it 
away. She is all ready to lay hold on it and magnify 
it all she can. If to-day, in some as yet unopened 
island of the southern seas, there should be found a 
type of spiritual life far surpassing anything which 
heathenism ever yet has shown, a fear of God and 



The Earth of the Redemption. 187 

a sense of duty and desire of holiness which made 
that island shine in the midst of heathenism like a star 
— what would be the true feeling of Christianity to- 
wards that island? Would there not be a special 
impulse to send our missionary there ? Not the same 
impulse indeed which makes us want to send him to 
some horrid land, where men are murdering and tor- 
turing each other in their cruelty and lust, but a yet 
higher impulse ; not the impulse which makes you 
want to put just one ray of light into the utter black- 
ness of the midnight, but the impulse which makes 
you want to pour the full glory of the noontide into 
the beautiful but imperfect glory of the morning. 

And then the other objection to the work of For- 
eign Missions lies in the imperfection of Christians. 
You know the venerable argument which was never 
very strong, and which halts and stumbles now from 
age and long dishonorable service: "The heathen 
in Boston ! " we are told. " Look how poor a tiling 
our home religion is. Shall we not make our own 
religion strong, convert our own masses, conquer 
our own sins, before we go around the world to 
preach our yet unappropriated gospel to the heath- 
en?" It is not always those who are most earnest 
01 active to complete our home religion who use 
such an argument. But that is not the point. Jt 
all proceeds upon a wrong idea of Christianity, and 
of its way of gaining power over man. If we re- 
cur a moment to the simple figure which I used 
awhile ago, and see the one child who stands nearest 
to the door taking his father's message first, the ques- 



188 The Earth of the Redemption. 

tion comes at once: What right has that one child 
to keep the message all to himself, until such time 
as he has perfectly read and learned and inwardly 
digested it, before he gives it to his brothers, whose 
it is as much as his ? What right has Andrew to 
wait till he is sure that he has perfectly comprehen- 
ded Jesus, before he findeth his brother Simon, and 
pours into his ears the tidings which belong to both, 
" We have found the Messias " ? 

Probably it is not an argument with which it is 
worth while to argue, but we cannot help thinking 
where, with such an argument in force, would have 
been the richness of Christian history ! If every 
land must for itself have made the very best and 
fullest use of the Gospel before it could offer it to 
any other land, how the great work would have 
halted and stayed in its first littleness. Still, on the 
desolate fields of Galilee, or amid the ruins of Jeru- 
salem, a few disconsolate and hopeless Jews would 
be telling to-day to one another the nn believed and 
unused story of the cross. The earnest heart and 
manly intellect of Paul, full of the spirit of his Mas- 
ter, soon broke the spell of such a sophistry as that, 
and Europe saw the light through the dim medium 
of a Judaism Avhich was itself still more than half 
darkness. 

Truth is too eager to wait for any one soul to ap- 
propriate it perfectly before it presses on through it 
to other souls. Truth will crowd like the river 
through narrow gates of rock, to reach the open val- 
ley which waits for her beyond, and will not deny 



The Earth of the Redemption. 1 89 

her richness to the open valley until she has worn 
herself a full broad passage through the slowly 
yielding rock. A little child finds a strange shell 
upon the sea shore, and he need not wait until he has 
himself completely understood it before he carries it 
to the great naturalist and gives him in it the one 
golden key to whole regions of knowledge which 
have been locked up and useless. Indeed there is 
no nobler sight than to see the weaker thus minis- 
tering to the greater of its own half appreciated 
knowledge of the works of God. Let every man tell 
what he knows of truth, of nature, and of God; and 
other men hearing his message, shall send back to 
him interpretations of it which he could never have 
discovered for himself. Keflected out of other men's 
experiences it shall come back to enlighten him. 
That is the only principle. 

This is the simple principle of foreign missions. 
See what we have to-day. The world is growing 
more and more open every year. No longer like a 
ship with watertight compartments, any one of which 
might be flooded with blessing or with rain, and the 
rest remain unconscious of the change, no richer 
and no poorer than they were before ; but now, with 
all its bulkheads broken down, so that the whole 
great system is but one, and what belongs to any part 
belongs to all, so lives the world to-day, so it is evi- 
dently going to live more and more in days to come. 

No longer are there clearly defined limits of Chris- 
tendom and heathenism. The Chinese Joss House 
grins in its fantastic worship on the streets of San 



190 The Earth of the Redemption. 

Francisco, and the truths of Christianity are debated 
on the highways of Japan. For the iirst time in the 
history of the world there is a manifest possibility of 
a universal faith. Distance has ceased to be a hin- 
drance. Language no longer makes men total stran- 
gers. A universal commerce is creating common 
bases and forms of thought. For the first time in the 
history of the world there is a manifest, almost an 
immediate, possibility of a universal religion. No 
wonder that at such a time the missionary spirit 
which had slumbered for centuries should have 
sprung upon its feet, and the last fifty years should 
have been one of the very greatest epochs in mis 
sionary labor in the whole history of the world. 

I have indicated clearly enough to-day what is the 
special character of this new missionary spirit of 
these modern times. It is not arrogant. It is hum- 
ble. It tries to learn as well as teach. It does not 
hesitate to feel and to declare its honor for very 
much of the greatness and spiritual power of the 
paganism to which it brings the Gospel. 

That spirit is a mighty gain. It is the spirit of 
light, and honesty and truth. It is full of faith in 
God and man. I have tried to show also that it is 
the spirit of an intensified and not of a diminished 
energy in missionary work. 

And yet we must not let that spirit run to false ex- 
tremes; we must not yield to false exaggerations. 
We must not idealize heathenism while we see all the 
faults and flaws of an arch-Christianity. The fact 
remains, beyond the contradiction of the wildest 



The Earth of the Redemption. 191 

folly, that the best part of the world to-day is Christ- 
ian, and not heathen. The healthiest life, the truest 
brotherhood, the noblest thought, the fullest man- 
hood, where is the advocate of heathen virtue, where 
is the critic or foe of Christian faith, who will deny to- 
day, as a plain fact, that all these great things are to 
be found within the sound of the Gospel, within the 
light of the cross, and not under the shadow of any 
heathen temple in the Tnost beautiful of pagan lands ? 
This is our plea for foreign missions. God has 
given the earth to the children of men. But the 
children of men are God's children too. Only in His 
name and fear do they truly possess the earth Avhich 
lie has given them. To claim the earth for Him 
was the great work of Christ. To claim the earth 
for Him must be the work of every servant of Christ 
who in any degree is like his Master. That claim is 
to be made first by living ourselves brave, pure, 
faithful, Godlike lives upon the earth, letting men 
see and proving to ourselves that a man may live 
upon this wicked earth as the true child of God. It 
is to be made again by telling to all mankind, in the 
never outworn, never outgrown story of the Incar- 
nation, that they and the earth on which they live 
are not their own but God's; are their own only be- 
cause they are God's; have been made truly and 
thoroughly their own by being redeemed to God in 
Jesus Christ. 



SERMON XL 

Ww fjftro with luw Safente. 

11 To another lie gave two talents." — Matthew xxv. 15. 

IN the parable of Jesus the master stands with 
three servants before him. He is just ready to 
start upon his journey, and he is giving them his last 
commissions. For reasons of his own, he makes a 
difference between them. To one he gives five tal- 
ents, and to another two, and to another one. " To 
every man according to his several ability," the 
story adds. Then he goes off and leaves them, and 
each is faithful or faithless in the use of the money 
with which he is entrusted. 

I want to speak to-day about the man with the two 
talents. He has his own peculiar interest, as he 
stands in the little group of three before the master. 
He is significant, we may almost say, because of his 
insignificance. As their Lord puts the money in 
their hands, we can see them look at it, and can 
guess what they think about it. The man to whom 
five talents are given, is surprised that he should re- 
ceive so much. He is exhilarated and inspired; or 
192 



The Man with Two Talents. 193 

perhaps, on the other hand, he is paralyzed and over- 
come. The man to whom one talent is given is 
startled at the smallness of the trust. He too feels a 
positive emotion. Either he is stung to energy and 
determines that he will do something strong and 
good, even with this little gift. Or else he is crushed 
into despair. Is this then all of which his Master 
thinks him worthy ? Both of these men are interest- 
ing. They represent extremes. But the man of two 
talents stands and looks at his trust, and it is just 
about what he might have expected. It is neither 
very great nor very small. It does not exalt him, and 
ir does not make him ashamed. He turns away and 
goes out to use it with a calm, unexcited face. He is 
the type of common mediocrity. He is the average 
man. 

It is very easy to be interested in the man of five 
talents, or in the man of one talent. Their interest 
takes hold of us at once. But I think that, as we 
look at life longer and study it -more deeply, we feel 
more and more the importance of their less sensa- 
tional brother, the man of the two talents, and are 
more and more interested in seeing what he does 
with his money, have more and more respect for him 
when we see him going conscientiously to work to 
turn it to its best result. Let us think of him awhile 
this morning; the man who is neither very rich nor 
very poor, not notable because of excess or of defect, 
the man with gifts like a million others, the average 
man. 

He ought to interest us, for he presents the type 
13 



194 The Man with Two Talents. 

to which we almost all belong. There are none of 
us probably who are conscious of anything which 
separates us as notably superior to the great mass of 
our fellow-men. On the other hand it is not probable 
that many of us count ourselves distinctly below the 
average of human life. We do not lay claim to the 
five talents; we will not confess to the one. It is as 
men and women of two talents that we ordinarily 
count ourselves, and ask to be counted by our breth- 
ren. Therefore this quiet, common-place, unnoticed 
man, going his faithful way in his dull dress which 
makes no mark and draws no eye, doing his duty in- 
significantly and thoroughly, winning so unobtru- 
sively at last his master's praise, ought to be interest- 
ing to us all. 

He ought to be interesting also because he repre- 
sents so much the largest element in universal hu- 
man life. The average man is by far the most 
numerous man. The man who goes beyond the aver- 
age, the man who falls short of the average, both of 
them, by their very definition, are exceptions. They 
are the outskirts and fringes, the capes and promon- 
tories of humanity. The great continent of human 
life is made up of the average existences, the mass of 
two-talented capacity and action. 

It is so even in the simplest and most superficial 
matter of the possession of wealth. The great for- 
tunes, with their splendid opportunities, and their 
tremendous responsibilities, rise like gigantic moun- 
tains which everybody sees out of the general level 
of comfortable life. On the other hand, excessive 



The Man with Two Talents. 195 

poverty, actual suffering for the necessities of life, 
terrible as it is, is comparatively rare. A part of its 
terribleness comes from its rarity. The great multi- 
tude of men are neither very rich nor very poor. 
The real character and strength of a community lies 
neither in its millionaires nor in its paupers, but in 
the men of middle life, who neither have more mon- 
ey than they know how to spend nor are pressed 
and embarrassed for the necessities of life. 

The same is true in the matter of joy and sorrow. 
The great mass of men during the greater part of 
their lives are neither exultant and triumphant with 
delight, nor are they crushed and broken down with 
grief. They do not go shouting their rapture to the 
skies, and they do not go wailing their misery to the 
sympathetic winds. They are moderately happy. 
Joy necked and toned down by troubles; troubles 
constantly relieved and lighted up by joy; that is 
their general condition ; that seems to be their best 
capacity. The power of the in tensest joy and the 
intensest pain belongs only to rare, peculiar men. 

Or if you think about mental capacity. Most men 
are neither sages nor fools. Or if you think about 
learning, few men are either scholars or dunces. Or 
if you think about popularity and fame, those whom 
the whole world praises and those whom all men de- 
spise are both of them exceptional. You can count 
them easily. The great multitude whom you cannot 
begin to count, who fill the vast middle-ground of 
the great picture of humanity, is made up of men 
who are simply well enough liked by their fellow- 



196 The Man with Two Talents. 

men. They are crowned with no garlands, and they 
are pelted with no stones. They have their share of 
kindly interest and esteem. You cannot well think 
of them as either losing that or as gaining much be- 
yond it. 

And when you come to the profounder and the 
more personal things, when you come to character 
and to religion, there too it is the average that fills 
your eye. Where are the heroes ? You can find them 
if you look. Where are the rascals ? You can find 
them too. Where are the saints ? They shine where 
no true man's eyes can fail to see them. And. the 
blasphemers, likewise, no one can shut out of his ears. 
But the great host of men, do you not know how lit- 
tle reason they give you to expect of them either 
great goodness or great wickedness ? You do not 
look to see their faces kindle when you talk to them 
of Christ. You do not either look to see them grow 
scornful or angry at his name. You do not count 
upon their going to the stake for principle. But you 
do count upon their paying their honest debts. You 
have to shut your thoughts about them in to this 
world, for when you think of them in eternity heav- 
en seems as much too good for them as hell seems 
too bad. 

Sometimes, when we let it crowd itself upon us, 
this fact of the predominance of mediocrity, or of 
the average in life, becomes oppressive. It seems to 
level life into a great, broad, flat, dreary plain. The 
men of two talents seem to have the world to them- 
selves. Finding ourselves men of two talents, we 



The Man with Two Talents. 197 

sometimes seem to be simply adding by our existence 
a little more monotony and oppression to the mono- 
tonous and oppressive life of the great world. 

We cannot get rid of such oppression, and the de- 
moralization which it brings, by simply denying or 
ignoring the fact of the preponderance of mediocrity. 
The fact is too unquestionable. Only by redeeming 
mediocrity, in our own and other men's esteem; 
only by asserting and believing that the man of two 
talents has a great place and a great chance in the 
world, only so can we restore the healthy thought 
of life which the first sight of his numerousness dis- 
turbs. This is what I want to try to do this morn- 
ing. I want to speak first of the dangers which 
come to us when we know ourselves to be two-talent 
men, and then of the escape from those dangers as 
we come to know the special powers and privileges 
which belong to our limited and middle life. 

We need to remember very clearly that what we 
are speaking of all along is the possession of powers, 
not the use of powers. Every man is bound to use 
the powers he possesses to their fullest. But the 
limit of the powers which each man possesses is not 
in his own hands, and there is where the vast 
majority of men are obliged to make up their minds 
to mediocrity. 

It is not always an easy thing for men to make up 
their minds to mediocrity. We cannot tell in how 
many natures there comes deep struggle and sad 
disappointment before the lot of the average man is 
cordially accepted. A young man starts untried. 



198 The Man with Two Talents. 

He is a problem to himself and everybody else. Who 
can say what strange capacity is folded in this yet 
unopened life? It is a young man's right, almost 
his duty, to hope, almost to believe, that he has sin- 
gular capacity, and is not merely another repetition 
of the constantly repeated average of men. Before 
he unfolds the bundle which his Lord has given him, 
he may well see in his imagination the five bright 
talents shining through its folds. We would not 
give much for the young man to whom there came 
no such visions and dreams of extraordinary life. 
To see those dreams and visions gradually fade 
away ; little by little to discover that one has no such 
exceptional capacity; to try one and another, of the 
adventurous ways which lead to the high heights 
and the great prizes, and find the feet unequal 
to them ; to come back at last to the great trodden 
highway, and plod on among the undistinguished 
millions, that is often very hard. The fight is 
fought, the defeat is met, in silence; but it is no less, 
it is more terrible. The hour in which it becomes 
clear to a young man that that is to be his life, that 
there is nothing else for him to do except to swell 
the great average of humanity, is often filled with 
dangers. Let us see what some of those clangers are. 
In the first place, the man of two talents has to 
make up his mind to do without both of the different 
kinds of inspiration which come to the men who are 
better off and the men who are worse off than he is. 
The man of five talents, the man of exceptional gifts 
and opportunities excites admiration and excites ex- 



The Man ivith Two Talenis. 199 

pectation. He is conscious of abilities, and. of the 
demands which other men make of him because of 
those abilities. He feels men's eyes upon him. 
Wherever he goes there is a hush to see what he 
w T ill do. He is surrounded. w T ith an atmosphere of 
responsibility. Men hang upon him for his help. 
Men's jealousy even, and their readiness to criticise 
him, and his own fear lest he fall short of his pos- 
sibilities, are continual safeguards and incentives. 
This must be more to him than we can begin to 
estimate. And on the other hand, the man who 
labors under constant disadvantages, he also has a 
sting and a spur of quite another kind. To do great 
things in spite of difficulties, that is a very bugle- 
call to many men. There comes a desperation which 
is inspiration. To hear all men saying, " you can do 
everything," there is great strength in that. To 
hear men saying, u you can do nothing," in that 
too there is strength. Have you read the delightful 
biography of Henry Fawcett the English statesman, 
who, in total blindness, fought his way to the House 
of Commons and became a power in the realm ? It 
has been the hopelessness of their lot that has made 
the noble lives of many of the noblest men the world 
has seen. 

But now to the middle man, the man w r ho is 
neither very much nor very little — the man who has 
two talents, but only two — both of these forms of im- 
pulse are denied. He is neither high enough to hear 
the calling of the stars, nor low enough to feel the 
tumult of the earthquake. What wonder if he often 



200 The Man with Two Talents. 

falls asleep for sheer lack of sting and spur. What 
wonder if he does the moderate things that seem to be 
within his power unenthusiastically, and then stops, 
making no demand upon himself, since other men 
make no demand upon him. 

And then again the work which the five-talent men 
and the w T ork which the one-talent men undertake is 
apt to have a definiteness and distinctness which the 
work of the average man is very liable to lose. Ge- 
nius, by its very intensity, decrees a special path of 
fire for its vivid power. Conscious limitation, on the 
other hand, knows there is no hope for it except in 
one direction. Both have the strength which comes 
by narrowness. But the man who knows himself to 
be only moderately strong, is apt to think that his 
strength has no peculiar mission. He wastes himself 
on this and that in general, and aims at nothing in 
particular. The commonplace man is the discursive 
man. He has neither the impetuosity of the torrent 
nor the direct gravitation of the single drop of water. 
He lies a loose and sluggish pool, and flows nowhither 
and grows stagnant by-and-by. 

And yet again, there is the constant danger of 
being made light of by other men. The man of 
whom we speak becomes uninteresting to other peo- 
ple, and so loses interest in himself. He attracts no 
reverence and he enlists no pity. Men do not say 
of him, u How great he is !" nor do they say, " Poor 
fellow!" He finds himself unnoticed. He must 
originate out of himself all that he comes to. He 
hangs between the heaven and the earth, and is fed 



The Alan with Two Talents. 201 

out of neither. What he does seems to be of no 
consequence, because it wakens no emotion in his 
brethren. He has no influence on other men, and so 
there is no effluence, no putting forth of ]ife from him. 
Am I not telling a familiar story ? Suppose your- 
self an apostle of the Lord, a gospel exhorter, trying 
to stir men's souls to repentance and to faith. Do 
you not know what you would say to the man of 
brilliant genius, how you would adjure him to con- 
secrate his splendid powers to God ? Do you not 
know what you would say to the poor human creature 
who seemed hardly more than a brute, begging him 
to claim his place in spite of everything among God's 
children ? But to the man of ordinary faculties and 
decent life and sluggish will, what can you say ? I 
think of Jesus looking in the faceof John, and John's 
whole soul i?, stirred. I think of Jesus gazing 
mournfully at Judas, and I cannot estimate the power 
of that sorrowful reproach. There must have been a 
middle class; a temperate zone of the apostolic life — 
James the son of Alphseus, and Lebbseus whose sur- 
name was Thaddasus — between whom and the Master, 
life and the giving and receiving of emotion was 
more tame and less intense. However that may 
have been, the dangers of the temperate zone in life, 
less immediately under the Lord's eye, are manifest. 
Routine respectability in conduct, unenterprising 
orthodoxy in opinion, an absence of high self-respect, 
which easily makes way for petty self-conceit, humble- 
ness which is not true humility, and calmness which is 
not energetic peace, these are the dangers of the men 



202 The Man with Two Talents. 

who have counted the talents which their Lord has 
given them and found them only two. 

Of course the other men, the richer and the poorer 
men, have botli of them their dangers, of which one 
easily might speak in other sermons. Whether they 
are greater or less than this man's dangers, is but an 
idle and unanswerable question. This man's are 
very real and very great. 

And yet in spite of all of them (to come to the sec- 
ond of my two divisions), the man with two talents 
has a great chance in the world. Alas, for the world, 
if he had not ! For, as I said, it is of him that the 
world mainly is composed. Let us turn now and try to 
see what his chances are. I would fain seem to my- 
self to be looking, as I speak, into his oppressed and 
discouraged face, and would try to stir him to a 
more vigorous and hopeful and enthusiastic spirit. • 

And I would say first, ought you not to remem- 
ber that it is the quality, more than in the quantity 
of talents that their true value lies? Your talents 
may be two, another's five, another's one; the real 
point of importance is that yours, whether they be 
few or many, that yours, as much as anybody's, were 
given you by God and constitute a true, direct, and 
sacred connection and channel of intercourse be- 
tween your soul and. His. That belongs to the very 
fact of gift. What matters it that hundreds of mil- 
lions of other men have received abuut the same 
amount of gift from God as you ? What would it 
matter if hundreds of millions of other men's gifts 
had been exactly and absolutely identical with 



The Man with Two Talents. 203 

yours ? That is not true. Your gifts, whatever 
they may be in bulk, are different in kind from any 
other man's that ever lived. But what if that were 
true ? Would not your gift be still as truly yours, and 
open to your soul as true a possible communion with 
God as if you had been chosen to be the one only 
two-talented man in all his kingdom of humanity? 
You must forget your brethren, and think of Him. 
You must get beyond the relative and get into the 
absolute. 

And if your place in the great crowd of medio- 
crity makes it the harder for you to attain to this, it 
ought to make the attainment all the more clear and 
sure when it is won. It is easy for the mountain to 
trace the sun's ray direct from the sun to its illumi- 
nated peak. It is harder for one wave on the toss- 
ing sea to believe that it too has its bridge of sun- 
light to the sun ; but when it once has found it, the 
undiscriminated wave must cling to that radiant 
bridge even more eagerly and strongly than the sin- 
gle separate mountain summit. 

But then, when you have once separated yourself 
from the great mass, and realized your direct rela- 
tionship to God, then you may come back into the 
mass again and see what are the special advantages 
which belong to a faithful life lived in the average 
condition, lived with the average capacities of man. 

Such a life brings out and makes manifest the solid 
strength which belongs to the simple qualities of 
manhood. We are so apt to grow frantic and fantas- 
tic in our struggles. We paint our heroes fighting 



204 The Man with Two Talents. 

their battles in the clouds or in the depths. Types of 
power which can only be developed in supreme joy 
or supreme sorrow enthrall our imagination; and 
then some plain man comes who knows not either rap- 
ture or despair, who simply has his daily work to do, 
his friends to help, his enemies to forgive, his children 
to love and train, his trials to bear, his temptations 
to conquer, his soul to save; and what a healthiness 
he brings into our standards, with what a genuine 
refreshment he fills our hearts. Behold how great 
are these primary eternal qualities — patience, hope, 
kindness, intelligence, trust self-sacrifice. We do not 
accept them because we cannot have something finer. 
They show us their intrinsic fineness and we do 
them reverence. The arctic frost ! The torrid heat ! 
behold the true strength, the real life of the planet 
is not in these. It is in the temperate lands that the 
grape ripens and the wheat turns calmly yellow in 
the constant sun. Blessed is the life which grows it- 
self into the consciousness of how strong a man is 
who with the average powers of a man keeps his in- 
tegrity and purity, becomes ever more upright and 
pure, and also encourages the lives of other men. 
Blessed is the life which becomes always more 
aware of this, and makes it more evident to its breth- 
ren. 

It is perhaps only saying the same thing in another 
way to claim that the man conscious of mediocrity 
has the advantage of displaying in his life and 
character the intrinsic and essential life of human 
nature. I have already said that he need not be 



The Man with Two Talents. 205 

lacking in the sense of personal distinctness. He 
gets that from his immediate connection with God. 
But the other sense, the sense of being thoroughly 
one with fellow-men, that too is very necessary for 
the fullest life. Let it exist alone, and it may only 
amount to being lost in the great mass. Let it exist 
along with a clear consciousness of personal commis- 
sion from the hand of God, and it is full of value. It 
backs the single career with all the history of man. 
It surrounds it with the warm domestic atmosphere 
of human society. Anything which breaks in upon 
that sense of living the intrinsic life of humanity and 
makes the personal life seem to be exceptional and 
original and solitary, whatever compensations it may 
bring, brings surely harm. It cannot be good for 
any man to live constantly in a condition which 
makes him count himself exceptional, or rather in a 
condition which makes him think more of the ex- 
ceptional than of the universal element in his life. 
Sometimes, as a separate and temporary experi- 
ence, it may be good. Sometimes to count oneself 
happy beyond any other man's experience of hap- 
piness, sometimes to be compelled to cry "Behold 
and see, was there ever sorrow like to my sor- 
row ! " that may be very good. It is very good 
for the single drop of water here and there to be 
cast up out of the stream and flash an instant in 
the sun alone, or be whirled alone a moment by 
the furious wind; but its great normal strength 
is for it to be part of the great current, to feel the 
universal purpose round and in itself. So only 



206 The Man with Two Talents. 

does it flow on in power and peace, and at last 
come to the sea. 

And if the man of two talents is able thus pecu- 
liarly to feel his oneness with his race, that does not 
only make him calm and happy. It also makes him 
strong. It is a source of power. It gives him the 
ability to help his fellow-men in ways which, whether 
they be greater or less than other men's ways, are 
peculiarly his own. We naturally exaggerate the 
influence of notable people. I would not underes- 
timate it. When God sends forth some shining herald 
of Himself, whose supreme felicity makes all men 
gaze in wonder ; or when he opens and displays in 
some one of his children's lives the depths of man's 
capacity of pain, so that all other men stand over- 
whelmed with brother-pain and pity; in either case 
he dowers those exceptional careers with special 
capacity of helpfulness. But the world does not, 
cannot rest for its perpetual needs on lives like 
those. It is not the wind which breathes upon the 
planet from without. It is the instinct which resides 
in each particle bedded deep in the mass of the 
planet, and which draws it always to the centre of its 
gravitation, that keeps the planet in its place. The 
man in whom men recognize simply an average 
human nature like their own, no greater and no less, 
who they know has all their passions and infirmities 
and no more than their strength to meet them w 7 ith, 
he is the man who, being faithful, pure, serene, brave, 
hopeful, has power to make his brethren all that he 



The Man with Two Talents. 207 

tries to be, of a kind which no brilliant leader of his 
race can show. 

For he can at once show men what is good and 
make it seem possible. These two together make 
the moral need of humankind. Men have perverted 
and false standards; and when they see what the true 
standard is, the life to which it seems to call them 
seems impossible. But here, lo ! is a man whom 
they cannot call exceptional. And see, with just their 
tools he does this finer work. The thing they call 
impossible for men like them, he, being a man like 
them, does. Is there not here a power, and is it not 
a power which belongs distinctly to the man's medi- 
ocrity, to the fact that he is an average man, and no 
exception ? 

Can you not conceive of a man's feeling that in- 
spiration, and is it not a noble inspiration for a man 
to feel ? You answer me, perhaps, " Yes, but for the 
average man to feel that inspiration would prove that 
he was not an average man. The power to feel an 
inspiration such as that, constitutes him immediately 
an exception." But I remind you that I am not 
talking of any mediocrity except that of powers or 
of circumstances. Not of a mediocrity in will or 
purpose. I am supposing a man of thoroughly com- 
monplace and ordinary powers, and of perfectly mo- 
notonous life, who at the same time wants to serve 
his fellow-men. There is nothing violent, nothing 
incongruous in such a supposition ; and what I claim 
is that such a man has, in the very things which make 
his chance seem most hopeless, a chance of influence 



208 The Man with Two Talents, 

and usefulness and power which is peculiarly his 
own. 

Two other possible advantages of average life I 
can do no more than just suggest to you. May it 
not find a self-surrender to the help of other lives 
more easy, and make that self-surrender more com- 
plete just in proportion as it is released from that de- 
sire for self-assertion, that consciousness of being 
something which is worthy of men's observation, 
that self- value which must haunt the lives of those 
who, in any way, on either side, find themselves sep- 
arated from the great bulk of their fellow-creatures ? 

And is it not true that all that assertion of the 
intrinsic value of every life, which is the very essence 
of our Christian faith, all that redemption of the 
soul, in the profoundest and the truest sense, which 
was the work of Christ, must come with special wel- 
come and appreciation and delight to any man who 
feels his insignificance, and is in danger of losing 
himself in the vague mass of his fellows. Christ 
redeems him. Christ says, " Behold yourself in 
me, and see that you are not insignificant." Christ 
says, " I died for you." Set thus upon his feet, 
made a new man, or made to be the man he is, with 
what gratitude and faith and obedience must that 
man follow the Christ who is his Saviour ! 

Here let us pause. Shall we not seem to see this 
man of the two talents standing with what seem to 
be the respectable and comfortable, but uninspiring 
and uninteresting conditions of his life, this man for 
whom the prophecy of Agur, the son of Jakeh has 



The Man with Two Talents. 209 

been fulfilled, and who has been given " neither pov- 
erty nor riches." What shall he do? If he were 
strong and abundant, he would stand up joyously and 
sweep away evil, and set wrong right, and build some 
corner of the kingdom of God, to the sound of psalms 
and trumpets. If he were wretched and destitute, 
he would defy his circumstances, and make their 
very desperation sting him into strength. But now 
what shall he do? Just settle down into a life of 
uselessness and thoughtlessness and harmless ness 
and base animal comfort? That is what the tempta- 
tion is so strong to do. Oh, that we might see to- 
day that something else is possible. Oh that we 
might know that no child of God is lost into indis- 
criminateness from his Father's sight! Oh, that we 
might see how out of the very fact of our mediocrity 
come opportunities of special faithfulness and of pe- 
culiar service to God and to our fellow-men. 

" He that had received two talents, he also gained 
other two." Those words, two verses on, complete 
the story of the average man, faithful in mediocrity. 
What an epitaph those words would make to write 
upon the tombstone of a man who, neither very rich 
nor very poor, neither very joyous nor very sad, 
neither very wise nor very ignorant, neither very 
strong nor very weak, had done his duty bravely 
and unselfishly, and then passed on, to be lost again 
among the hundred and forty and four thousand who 
follow the Lamb, but to do his portion of God's work 
in heaven as he has done it on the earth. What soul 

could ask for better destiny or praise than that ? 
14 



SERMON XII. 

§t$tmttm mft gnUHmmt 

11 1 am not come to destroy, hut to fulfil." — Matthew v. 17. 

IT was necessary that Christ the Son of God, man- 
ifesting His Father to mankind, should live 
at one special point in human history and at one spec- 
ial spot in the world's geography. There had to be 
some one age whose peculiar circumstances should 
give shape to the events of his life. There had to 
be some one land which should become forever 
memorable and sacred as that on which his feet had 
walked. But yet, while this is true, everybody w T ho 
understands Christ, knows that what took place 
visibly in Palestine is taking place spiritually every- 
where and always. Christ is always coming. And 
that coming of the gracious presence which men saw 
and touched, and whose words fell with warning or 
exalting power on their ears, while it had its own 
separate and unshared value, was also representa- 
tive of what is continually going on. What Christ 
was then, he always is ; what Christ did then, he is 

always doing. And so if we want to know how 
210 



Destruction and Fulfilment 211 

Christ works to-day, we have the Gospel for a perpet- 
ual guide. The phenomena of that first coming must 
be the phenomena of all Christianity. Take out of 
them that in their tone which is manifestly local 
and temporary, and the words which Jesus spoke of 
and to the Judaism of his time are the same words 
which he is always speaking to the Judaisms of all 
times. So long as His salvation is not yet complete, 
He walks unseen in the world, as once he walked 
seen in Jerusalem, and speaks to men's attentive 
souls as once He spoke to their listening ears. 

The words which I have chosen for my text this 
morning illustrate this. When Jesus came into the 
world to establish the perfect religion, he found here 
an imperfect faith. The old faith of the Jews, into 
the very heart of which the Lord was born, and 
where his life was lived, knew much of God ; indeed 
knew more of God than any other religion which 
the world possessed. Jesus knew still more. He 
brought a higher a ad diviner presence. He came 
with a complete salvation. How should he treat 
this partial, this imperfect faith which was already 
on the ground? He might do either of two things. 
He might sweep it away and begin entirely anew, 
or he might take this imperfect faith and fill it out 
to completeness. He might destroy or he might ful- 
fil. With the most deliberate wisdom he chose one 
method and rejected the other. " I am not come to 
destroy, out to fulfil," he said. Those are most critical, 
decisive words. They declare the whole fundamental 
method of the Master's ministry. They have their 



2 1 2 Destruction and Fulfilment. 

root and necessity, as I think we shall see, in the 
Master's nature. It is right that we who live in a 
world where Christ is still at work, should under- 
stand his method and see what it means, both for the 
world and us; that he who comes to save the world 
and to save men declares that it is as a fulfiller and 
not as a destroyer that he comes. 

A fulfiller and a destroyer. Let us first clearly 
understand the difference; and that we may under- 
stand it best, it will be well to look at it in regions 
with which we are familiar. 

Look at it in nature. What is the truly majestic 
power of the earth ? Surely not destruction ! Sure- 
ly not the forces which sweep out of being the things 
which are harmful and mischievous ! There are 
such forces, but the thought about the world which 
made those forces seem the venerable and admirable 
forces, the forces to which men's worship and admi- 
ration ought to be given, would be horrible ! It is 
the forces of fulfilment, the forces which are always 
crowding every process forward to its full activity, 
crowding every being and structure out to its com- 
pletest realization of itself, the forces of construction 
and growth; these are the real vital forces of the 
world. Nature takes hold of every capacity of liv- 
ing which she finds anywhere, and turns it into life. 
Her rain and dew find out the least vitality and 
feed it. To make each imperfection a little less im- 
perfect, to bring each partial being a little nearer to 
completeness, to minister growth and not decay, to 
minister decay only as an incident and a means to 



Destruction and Fulfilment. 213 

growth, not to destroy but to fulfil, that is what na- 
ture comes lor with her orderly seasons and recur- 
ring years. 

Let this serve us for an illustration. Go further on 
and think of what man does to his fellow-man. We 
are so often set to be, as it were, natures to each oth- 
er. Lives bend over other lives as the sky bends 
over the earth. Influences come from man to man 
as the dew and sunshine come from the bounteous 
heavens to the ready ground. There is no one of 
you who has not some other nature which lies under 
your nature, as the field lies under tbe rain-cloud to 
receive its richness. When you think of that other 
nature waiting for your ministry, are you not aware 
of two different treatments, either of which you may 
give it ? Your child, your scholar, your servant^ 
you may fulfil him or you may destroy him. You 
destroy him if you fasten on everything that is bad 
and crude and ridiculous about him, and pour out 
upon it rebuke and contempt. You destroy him if 
you make him feel himself weak and insignificant, 
and drive him to despair. You destroy him if you 
make his great feeling about his own life to be 
shame. On the other hand you fulfil him, you fill 
him out to his full, to his fullest, if you catch 
everything that is good about him and water it 
with judicious encouragement and praise. You 
fulfil him if you recognize every feeblest and clum- 
siest effort to do right, if you inspire him with 
hope, if you make him seem to himself worth culti- 
vating and watching and developing. 



214 Destruction and Fulfilment. 

A friend told me the other day of walking along 
the crowded street close by two young people 
who were evidently coming home from work, and 
how he necessarily overheard their talk with one 
another. And one of them said, evidently referring 
to some act of an employer, " It was only a little 
thing, but I was so tired and discouraged that noth- 
ing ever did me so much good." Some word had 
been spoken, some deed had been done which had 
fulfilled that tired and discouraged life a little. How 
easy and simple it appears, and yet how rare it some- 
times seems. To say u well-done " to any bit of work 
that has embodied good effort, is to take hold of the 
powers which have made the effort and confirm and 
strengthen them. But if you have nothing to say to 
your child or to your scholar except (what may be 
perfectly true) that much of his work is badly done, 
that he is wasting opportunities and losing the value 
of his life, then you are coming to him not to ful- 
fil but to destroy. 

I beg you to think of this, you who are set in po- 
sitions of superintendence and authority. Make a 
great deal more of your right to praise the good than 
of your right to blame the bad. Never let a brave 
and serious struggle after truth and goodness, how- 
ever weak it may be, pass unrecognized. Do not be 
chary of appreciation. Hearts are unconsciously 
hungry for it. There is little danger, especially 
with us in this cold New England region, that appre- 
ciation shall be given too abundantly. Here and 
there, perhaps, in your shops and schools and house- 



Destruction and Fulfilment, 215 

holds, there is some one who has too lazily sunk 
down upon the praise he has received for some good 
work, and rested in sluggish satisfaction on it; but 
such disasters hardly count among the unfulfilled 
lives which have lived meagrely and stuntedly for 
the lack of some simple cordial human approval of 
what they have honestly, however blunderingly, 
tried to do. 

Upon a larger scale do we not know how in the 
world at large there are the two kinds of men, the 
fulfilling and the destroying men? There are some 
men who call out the best of their brethren every- 
where. There are men in history whose whole work 
has been of this sort. They made the better parts of 
human life seem possible and seem worth while. They 
were like sunshine; and the plants under their in- 
fluence lifted themselves up and hoped to live. When 
such men died, they left the world more vital and 
complete because they had lived in it. There are 
other men whose whole mission is to destroy. The 
things which they destroy are bad and ought to be 
destroyed, but none the less the issue of the work 
of such men is for disheartening and not for encour- 
agement. We are rich in such men now-a-days, per- 
haps never more rich. They count the tares so loud 
that the field grows ashamed of itself, and forgets to 
tell itself that there is wheat. Alas, for the city, the 
state, the nation or the church where mere de- 
structive criticism has possession of men's tongues 
and ears. 

If any of you who are trying to do right are over- 



216 Destruction and Fulfilment. 

come sometimes by the abundance of criticism on 
your failures and the absence of recognition of your 
struggles, what shall you do ? Rejoice that behind 
all your fellow-men is God ! Eejoice that there is 
oue soul so sensitive to good that no poor struggler, 
110 weak child in any corner of this universe can 
make the slightest struggle after goodness without 
that great good soul's feeling it instantly and recog- 
nizing it with eagerness and joy. If I can know 
that I am strong, let all my brethren, if they will, 
see only the bad in me and not the good. I will 
not be indifferent to what they see. I will regret it 
and deplore it; but every effort which I make for 
righteousness shall fly past their indifference, and 
find God, and report itself to Him. Fixed in His 
sympathetic recognition, every such effort becomes 
a mark of attainment from which I cannot after- 
wards recede, and so with each such effort the 
gradual fulfilment of my life grows more complete. 

The nobility and dignity of any work is measured 
by the powers which it demands and uses. And so, 
I think, that the greatness of the work of the fulfiller, 
as compared with the work of the destroyer, is indi- 
cated by the faculties and qualities which it requires. 
Destruction calls for nothing but hatred and vigor. 
Fulfilment calls for sympathy, intelligence, patience 
and hope. It is so easy to give the bruised reed one 
blow and break it, to put a summary hand upon the 
smoking flax and quench it. Just to stand up in the 
community, and abuse its meanness, or its irreligion, 
just to arraign some sinner and upbraid his drunken- 



Destruction and Fulfilment. 2 1 7 

ness or his licentiousness, that is so easy. But to 
take the latent generosity, or the half-conscious re- 
ligion of a community and educate it and encourage 
it, to take the remnants and the seeds of good which 
are in the poor, broken, besotted life of the wretched 
libertine, or drunkard, and rebuild them into a new 
career, that is so hard. The one needs only hatred 
and vehemence; the other needs love and intelligence 
and patience and hope. I know that the second is 
the nobler work, because of the nobler powers it de- 
mands. I know that it is better not merely for the 
soul which I try to fulfil, but also for my soul, that 
I should be the fulfiller and not the destroyer of my 
brother. 

But there is one more truth, which we must re- 
member, to make our statement with regard to ful- 
filment and destruction entirely complete. And that 
is, that fulfilment of itself involves destruction. 
The fulfilment of the good involves the destruction 
of the bad. Make anything in the world complete 
and perfect after its true nature, and you must there- 
by drive out whatever there is of falsehood and pos- 
itive corruption in it. That statement does not deny 
the fact, nor change the character of sin. God for- 
bid ! I have no patience with the foolish talk which 
would make sin nothing but imperfection, and would 
preach that man needs nothing but to have his de- 
ficiencies supplied, to have his native goodness edu- 
cated and brought out, in order to be all that God 
would have him be. The horrible incompetency of 
that doctrine must be manifest enough to any man 



2i8 Destruction and Fulfilment. 

who knows his own heart, or who listens to the tu- 
mult of wickedness which rises up from all the dark 
places of the earth. Sin is a dreadful, positive, malig- 
nant thing. What the world in its worse part needs 
is not be developed, but to be destroyed. Any other 
talk about it is shallow and mischievous folly. The 
only question is about the best method and means of 
destruction. Let the sharp surgeon's knife do its 
terrible work. Let it cut deep and separate as well 
and thoroughly as it can, the false from the true, the 
corrupt from the uncorrupt: it never can dissect 
away the very principle of corruption which is in the 
substance of the blood itself. Nothing but a new 
reinforcement of health can accomplish that. There 
is the whole story. Tear your sins away. Starve 
your tumultuous passions. Resist temptations. Aye, 
if you will, punish yourself with stripes for your ini- 
quities. Cry out to yourself and to your brethren, 
with every voice that you can raise, " Cease to do 
evil ; " but all the time, down below, as the deepest cry 
of your life, let there be this other, " Learn to do 
w 7 ell." If you can indeed grow vigorously brave and 
true and pure ; then cowardice and falsehood and li- 
centiousness must perish in you. O wondrous silent 
slaughter of our enemies ! wondrous casting out 
of fear as love grows perfect ! death to sin, which 
comes by the new birth to righteousness! O de- 
struction, which is but the utterance of fulfilment on 
the other side ! everlasting assurance, that evil 
has of right no place in the world: and that if 
good would only lift itself up to its completeness, 



Destruction and Fulfilment. 219 

it might claim the whole world and all of manhood 
for itself ! 

Therefore with all the strength which God has 
given us, let us be fulfillers. Let us try to make the 
life of the world more complete. What can we do ? 
First, each of us can put one more healthy and holy 
life into the world, and so directly increase the aggre- 
gation of righteousness. That is much. To fasten 
one more link, however small, in the growing chain 
that is ultimately to bind humanity to God beyond 
all fear of separation, is very much indeed. And 
besides that, we can, with sympathy and intelli- 
gence, patience and hope, bring up the lagging side 
in all the vitality around us, and assert for man, the 
worth, the meaning and the possibility of this his 
human life. If all the men and women here were 
doing these two things, what a bright corner of the 
world this town, this church would be ! 

I have dwelt long on this most general statement 
of our truth, and my sermon is more than half done 
before I come to trace in several particulars how the 
method of fulfilment as distinct from the method of 
destruction, is, and always has been distinctively the 
method of the Christian faith. Let me do this as 
briefly as I can. 

Christianity from the beginning adopted the meth- 
od of fulfillment for its own propagation. It has 
wandered from it sometimes, but the inherent genius 
of its character has always brought it back to the 
idea that it was not directly to fight with and de- 
stroy the other religions of the world, but to satisfy 



220 Destruction and Fulfilment 

the longings which these other faiths expressed, and 
to lead on the powers which those faiths were using, 
to their fuller development and loftier employment. 
Christ, in the eyes of the first preachers of Christian- 
ity, Christ in his own eyes, was so completely the 
Master of this world, so thoroughly the sum and 
culmination of all good in the world, that every 
good work was capable of being taken up into him 
and made to open in his light into before uncon- 
scious and unsuspected power. St. Paul, preaching 
at Athens, is the representative speaker of that truth; 
but it is everywhere in the New Testament. In its 
more vivid re-appearance, in its more unhesitating 
re-assertion, lies the hope and prospect of the future 
triumphs of the Gospel. 

And as with regard to other religions, so with re- 
gard to that which does not call itself religion at all, 
so with that which, rejecting the very name of relig- 
ion, calls itself simply morality. Here is a man who 
is trying to do right. He does not talk of God, he 
does not think of God. He simply tries to do right. 
That man is somewhere here this morning. What 
does Christ say to him ? We need not be in doubt, 
for something very like his story is written in the 
Gospels. John said one day to Jesus, " Master, we 
saw one casting out devils in thy name, and we for- 
bade him, because he followeth not with us." And 
Jesus said, Forbid him not; for he that is not against 
us is on our part." " He that is not against us is on 
our part." There are only two parties in this world, 
the party of the right and the party of the wrong. 



Destruction and Fulfilment. 221 

He who is not for the wrong is for the right. The 
crudest, the least educated, the least developed, the 
most mistaken of the pleaders for the right, of the 
men who want to do right, is on the same side with 
the deepest soul, the most spiritually minded child of 
God, with Christ himself. 

We can well imagine that Jesus afterwards found 
out this half-instructed caster-out of devils, and dis- 
played Himself to him, and fulfilled his partial power, 
and made him one of his disciples. Certainly to the 
secular moralist He is forever going. That perpet- 
ual tendency of morality to become religion, to 
which all history bears witness, is but the continual 
effort of Christ to fulfil the imperfect. It fails again 
and again, but somewhere, sometime, it must suc- 
ceed. If not here, then in some world of larger 
freedom and more light, the soul which has here 
earnestly struggled to do right simply because it is 
right, must see God and recognize face to face the 
power which it has always been dimly feeling, in 
blind obedience to which it has heroically lived. 
Surely there shall be no more touching or impres- 
sive sight upon the borders of the eternal life, than 
this, the unreligious doer of duty seeing God, under- 
standing, perhaps in a lightning flash, whose is the 
authority which he has been obeying, whose is the 
strength on which he has been really resting all 
these years : and in one instant made religious, 
finding his imperfectness fulfilled with God, and 
casting himself in adoration and in love before the 
throne. 



222 



Destruction and Fulfilment. 



God sees our wickedness and pities it, through all 
his anger. God also sees our emptiness, and who 
can tell what is the feeling with which he looks at 
that. Our emptiness is our falling short of that 
which it is possible for us to be. It is not emptiness 
for us to be without that which it does not belong 
to our nature to possess. The pint measure is not 
empty that it does not hold a quart. The eagle is 
not empty of the power of running, nor the horse 
of the power of flying. Emptiness is defect. There 
is no defect where there is not a falling short of 
some original design. If you were not made to serve 
God out of love, the implanting in your life of lov- 
ing service would not be the fulfilment of your life. 
It would be an addition to it. It would be as if you 
tied wings to the horse's shoulders, not as if you 
bade them spring out of the eagle's sides. 

Do you not see the value which this gives to the 
declaration of Christ that he comes to be the ful- 
filler of the life of man ? He comes to give us divine 
enthusiasms, celestial loves. But it is not as strange, 
unnatural things that he would give them. It is as 
the legitimate possessions of our human nature, as 
the possessions which, unconscious, undeveloped, 
are ours already. The kingliness of nature which 
the human side of the Incarnation declared to be 
man's possible life, the divine side of the Incarnation 
makes to be the actual life of every man who really 
enters into its power. 

The same is true about that experience often so 
perplexing and distressing, in which one passes from 



Destruction and Fulfilment. 223 

a lower and a narrower to a higher and a broader form 
of faith or belief. These too Christ fulfils and does 
not destroy. Evidently such progress is possible. 
Many of us humbly rejoice in the belief that we have 
made such progress. And we believe in no portion of 
our lives have we more truly been under Christ's im- 
mediate guidance than in the making of that progress. 
But what became of the old faith ? Did Christ de- 
stroy it as a useless thing, a poor delusion, too false 
for any soul to live in ? Alas, for any one of us who 
sees no more in what he did for us than that ! He 
who thinks so must look back on the years in which 
he lived in his old faith, and call them years of 
waste. How could it be that God let the soul of his 
child live so long in prison ? But what if it were 
not a prison ? What if I can think of the advance 
which God has made possible for me into a larger 
faith, not as the setting free out of a dungeon, but as 
the movement forward from the imperfectness of 
youth into the riper life of manhood ? Call youth a 
prison, if you will. It is a prison whose walls are 
transparent hopes, and whose window-bars are sun- 
beams. There was no waste in those years of immatu- 
rity. It is easy to see that the years in which we 
believed narrowly and waited for the fulfilment 
which in part has come, were not wasted years, and 
it is not strange that God let his children remain in 
them so long! 

I hate to hear a man who has passed out of a nar- 
rower into a larger faith, upbraid and revile the faith 
in which he used to live. It is making the Christ 



224 Destruction and Fulfilment. 

who has led him, to be not the fulfiller, but the de- 
stroyer. It is shutting the flood-gates between the 
past and the present, so that what the man is gets no 
help from what he used to be. What shall the man 
who thinks so about the past make of the future ? 
Does he think there are no changes still awaiting 
him ? Does he think he has attained all truth ? If 
not, if there are new advances for him still to make, 
will the time come when on this which he is now, he 
will look back with the same hatred and scorn with 
which he looks back at this moment on his child- 
hood's creed ? The man who talks so is at heart a 
dogmatist. He has not learned the great truth of our 
Christianity, the truth of Christ, that that to which 
we belong is not an idea, however true, not a creed, 
however broad or narrow, but a friend, a father, God. 
Wherever God has given himself to us, that must be 
to us forever sacred ground. Whenever he has 
led us out from more imperfect into less imperfect 
truth, it has been fulfilment, not destruction of that 
in which he kept us living for awhile before we made 
the progress and saw the fuller light. God never de- 
stroys any real belief. When the Hindoo becomes a 
Christian, when the moralist becomes a Christian. 
when the narrow Christian becomes a broader Chris- 
tian, it is a deeper heart in the old life that opens. 
The old creed, the old experience lives more truly, 
and does not die, as it gives place to the new. 

How often, as you grow more earnest in your new 
faith, your old faith, which you seemed to have quite 
done with, re-appears and grows more sacred to 



Destruction and Fulfilment. 225 

yon, and you are sure that it has not perished, but is 
living in the heart of what you now believe. You 
become sure that in the perfect earnestness of heav- 
en, all that you ever thoroughly believed on earth 
will come back to you, and you will see that/ how- 
ever in your after life you rejected it, it was not in 
vain that you had once believed it. It will make 
part of your eternal faith. As I grow more and 
more earnest, I expect that my dead faiths will rise 
and show they are not dead. Let true faithfulness 
walk over the graves of a buried belief, and the dust 
of the long silent faith 

" Would hear her and heat, v 

Had it lain for a century dead — 
Would start and tremhle under her feet." 

They are not dead but sleeping, all that our hearts 
have ever truly, thoroughly believed. 

Let us fill ourselves with Christ's conception of him- 
self, and how full of richness and peace life becomes. 
Christ is always fulfilling us, while we wake and 
while we sleep, in work and rest, in joy and sorrow. 
He is always leading us forth into new and richer 
rooms of character and life and truth. Obedience, 
docility, perfect readiness to be led, that, that alone 
is what we want. May He give us that, and then 
fulfil us with Himself more and more, as our empti- 
ness opens wider and His grace abounds more and 
more richly through all eternity. 
15 



SERMON XIII. 

u And Jesus said, Make ! he men sit down" — John vi. 10. 

IT was on the farther side of the sea of Tiberias, 
a region which Christ seldom visited, a region 
which is to-day a wilderness. A multitude had fol- 
lowed the Lord across the water and were filling the 
empty place with crowd and clamor and confusion. 
Curiosity was all alive. What he had done last, what 
he would do next, was flying about in question and 
answer from mouth to mouth. The scene was full 
of movement. Every man was on his feet. Old 
friends were meeting. Christ's adherents were eag- 
erly pleading for him. The enemies of Christ were 
violently claiming that he was an impostor. Ges- 
tures were furious; words came fast; faces glowed; 
eyes sparkled; feet hurried back and forth. Such is 
the picture which seems to paint itself before us in 
the first verses of this sixth chapter of St. John. 

And then there comes a change. The midday 
sun grows hot. Hunger and exhaustion take pos- 
session of these excited frames. The need of rest 
226 



Make the Men Sit Down. 227 

overcomes the eagerness of action. And out of the 
midst of the flagging tumult comes the calm voice 
of Jesus, saying to his disciples who are closest to 
him, " Make the men sit down." And the disciples 
pass here and there through the crowd, doing their 
Master's will, until five thousand men are seated on 
the grass. 

Then a new scene appears. Quiet has come in 
place of the noise ; repose instead of action. Faces 
which just now were flushed and excited have grown 
calm. And, what is really at the heart of all, there 
is a change in the whole crowd's activity. It has 
become receptive. It is waiting to be fed. Not on- 
ly with the barley loaves and fishes. The presence 
of Christ is before it and it receives that. By-and-by 
the words of Christ fall on it and it receives them, 
until at last there begins to break forth from the 
seated ranks the declaration that they have indeed 
received him, and they whisper to one another, 
" This is indeed the prophet that should come into the 
world." 

This is the meaning which I find in the words of 
Jesus when he said to his disciples, " Make the men 
sit down." It is the change from the active and 
restless to the receptive and quiet state, from the con- 
dition in which all the life was flowing outward in 
eager self-assertion, to the other condition in which 
the life was being influenced, that is, being flowed 
upon by the richer power which came forth from 
him. 

If we let our thought separate one individual out 



228 Make the Men Sit Down. 

of the multitude and dwell on him, we can feel what 
I am speaking of more clearly. Here is a man who 
has come down out of Capernaum and crossed the 
lake and gone up after Jesus either as friend or foe. 
He has wanted to say something, to do something, 
to utter himself. He has been eager, active, confi- 
dent, vehement. By-and-by one of the disciples, John 
or Andrew or Bartholomew, has come to him as he 
was standing vehemently arguing, or as he was 
rushing hither and thither, shouting out his oracular 
judgments, and has said to him, "The Master bids 
you sit down and wait quietly until he feeds you." 
Can you not see the change which comes over the 
man's face ? In a moment he finds himself silent in 
the presence of a great divine graciousness, a wis- 
dom and power which is active for him. The sense 
of being fed, of having another's richness poured 
forth on him, takes possession of his soul. With the 
supply, the consciousness of needing to be fed grows 
deeper. Self-sufficiency, self-assertion fades away 
and is lost. Humility, docility, faith fills his whole 
nature. It is a new man that hardly knows the 
old. All this deepening and richening has come 
since the word of Jesus bade him sit down and be 
fed. 

If I have made the suggestion of the story clear, 
then we may almost entirely leave the story and pass 
on to the subject of which I wish to speak to you this 
morning. It is the need which comes to men of 
simply being fed by God, of ceasing from forth-put- 
tingness and self-assertion, and simply being recep- 



Make the Men Sit Down. 229 

tive to the influences which, come to them from 
divinity. 

Before I really begin to speak about that subject, 
I am moved to take my congregation into my confi- 
dence. I am moved to tell them of how a minister 
feels very often, and of how I feel to-day, what a 
great danger there is of the wrong people taking the 
wrong sermons to themselves. A minister preaches 
a sermon on the need of visible activity and utter- 
ance, and very often the man whose life needs medi- 
tation and quiet self-study takes the sermon to him- 
self, and rushes forth to even more of wild and super- 
ficial action. Again the preacher preaches on the 
necessity and duty of quietude, and just the soul 
which needs to put forth in action the impulse which 
it has already quietly accumulated, plunges itself 
more profoundly into quiescent calm. We take each 
other's medicines and often increase instead of healing 
our diseases. Many a time one wants not to take 
back a sermon he has preached, but to send quickly 
after it another which shall preach the other truth, 
and find the souls for which this, and not the first, 
was meant. I can only beg each of you to listen con- 
scientiously to-day, and see whether what I shall say 
is meant for you. 

There is a danger then for many men, if not for all, 
in the perpetual outgo of energy which so much of 
our life involves. Life is made up of tasks and pro- 
blems. How soon they meet us. How constantly 
they are with us all our days. " Come and do this," 
the world says to the little child, hardly more than a 



230 Make the Men Sit Down. 

baby, holding out to him some of its crude material 
which needs to be transformed into some other shape. 
" Come and see what you think of this," she says 
again, holding up some hard and knotty problem, and 
bidding him exercise his ingenious intellect upon it. 
It is one process of education, the calling out of pow- 
ers by their use. It is the tendency of all the prac- 
tical necessities of life, the constant outward move- 
ment of activity. " All is going out, nothing is com- 
ing in ; " is not that the dismay and the despair which 
settles down upon many an experience as it attains 
to middle life ? Existence comes to feel to many of 
us like a great river, which is always flowing with 
unbroken force downward to the sea. It never stops. 
It is always pushing its waters outward. It gives 
the sea no chance to flow up into it. So is the ever 
energetic life of one whose sole idea is to exert influ- 
ence, to make himself felt in some result. How often 
the river must long to pause. How often it must be- 
come aware that its impetuous rush is losing for it 
the richness of the great deep salt sea. How often 
the busy life of man becomes aware that somewhere 
round it there is richness which it does not get be- 
cause it opens outward only, and not inward* How 
often it desires to pause and grow receptive, and take 
into itself the richness which it now is keeping out. 
All this perhaps sounds very strange to some of us, 
this statement of the need of rest and receptivity. 
It will be good for us to stop a moment and remem- 
ber that there are races, and there have been times to 
which it has been anything but strange, to which it 



Make the Men Sit Down. 231 

has been the most familiar truth of life. You open 
the record of the Fourth Century and ifc is full of the 
pictures of hermits sitting- on rough mountain sides, 
or beside the great silent river of Egypt, just listening* 
for the voice of God. You let your boat drop quietly 
down the Ganges to-day, and along its banks the 
silent figures sit like carved brown statues, hour 
after hour, day after day, with eyes open and fixed 
on vacancy, clearing themselves of all thought, emo- 
tion and desire, that being emptied of self, they may 
see God. The most populous religion of the world 
to-day is that which flows out from the sacred seat, 
under the sacred tree at Gaya, where Buddha sat for 
six years silent, receptive, until the great illumination 
came. The East believes only too readily what the 
West finds it so very hard to realize and accept, that 
no life is complete which does not sometimes sit 
trustfully waiting to be fed by God. 

Are there not times enough in all our western 
lives, in all our lives, simply because and so far as 
they are human lives, when this same necessity 
bears witness of itself to us all ? The days of child- 
hood, before action has begun; the days of old age, 
when action is over; in both of those times the soul 
is sitting before God. Childhood is full of wonder 
and expectancy. Sitting at the father's knee, looking 
up into his face, that is its truest picture. Old age 
is not at its best if it is simply retrospective. It has 
travelled across the continent and stands upon the 
border of the great Pacific Sea, It feels the leagues of 
weary delightful journeying behind it, but its face, as 



232 Make the Men Sit Down. 

it waits upon the seashore, is towards the west, and not 
towards the east. God is speaking to it out of the 
awfol emptiness of the ocean and the unknown rich- 
ness of the lands beyond. The same is true of a 
great dismay, a great discovery, a great sorrow or a 
great joy. Can we find a truer description of that 
which has taken place some day, in the homes of 
all of you iuto whose faces I am looking now, than 
is included in the figure which I used a while ago? 
Some day the headlong current of your life was stop- 
ped. The river ceased to flow. The waves stood 
still, and then the ocean which the flowing of the riv- 
er had kept out, poured up and in, and there were 
sacreder emotions in the old channels, and deeper 
hopes and fears beating upon the well-worn banks. 
The day when your great bereavement came — the 
day when the neighbors knew that death was in 
your house — the day when joy, with that subtle look of 
the possibility of deep pain which is always in her 
eyes, came to your door and knocked, in the first 
splendor of the rising sun — the day when being 
weak and ill you did not go to your business, and the 
streets which you knew so well seemed strange to 
you as you looked out of the window : those were the 
days when God was feeding you. You lost the 
sense of being one who w T as to act, and you were one 
to whom God was to do something. You were for 
the time all oriental then. 

How sacred and rich afterwards become the rooms 
where such experiences have taken place. The 
stream may start again and push the intrusive ocean 



Make the Men Sit Down. 233 

once more back into its bed, but the river-channel 
can never quite forget its overflow. The house may 
go back to its common uses, and its doors open and 
shut upon the comers and goers of ordinary life, but 
it will never be quite the same that it was before the 
day on which the unseen presence filled it. It can 
never be perfectly secular again. This is the way 
in which the new houses which are so crude and raw 
when we move into them mellow and ripen as the 
}ears go on; as the earth which is so harsh and 
earthly in the glare of noontide, is softened and 
richened by the ever-returning dusk of morning 
and evening, in which it seems as if it once had been, 
and might again be, heaven. 

I want you to notice, with regard to this blessed- 
ness of a pause in the outflowing energy of life, that 
it applies not merely to what we call our secular oc- 
cupations, but to our sacred and religious ones as 
well. Indeed it often seems as if there were a 
sense in which it might be said that nothing so 
tended to keep God out of our lives as work for God 
done in a wrong and superficial spirit. This is one of 
the places where I am most anxious that the right 
people should take my sermon to themselves, and 
iiot the wrong ones. The Scripture reader, the 
Sunday School teacher, the Evangelist, the minister, 
the working layman, all of them I am sure have felt 
how religious work tries to push out religious 
thought and to kill the soul's receptivity. Thought 
made practical, turned into duty, tends to become 
like air turned into wind. That which was the most 



234 Make the Men Sit Down. 

yielding and penetrable of all substances, becomes 
the most impenetrable. There is no man whom I 
should less hope to teach the deeper spiritual truth, 
or to lead into the tenderest communion with God, 
than the man who with a hard set doctrine of salva- 
tion is most intensely devoted to the salvation of his 
fellow-men. The disciples as well as the stragglers 
from Capernaum — perhaps the busy disciples more 
than anybody else in all the crowd — must have 
needed Christ's call to sit down and be fed. The 
more earnestly you are at work for Jesus, the more 
you need times when what you are doing for him 
passes totally out of your mind, and the only thing 
worth thinking of seems to be what He is doing for 
you. That is the real meaning of the days of dis- 
couragement and self-contempt which come to all of 
us, O fellow laborers for the Lord. 

More precious then perhaps to one kind of worker 
than to another, but yet precious always and to all, 
are the days or moments when the flow of the river 
slackens, and the ocean pours itself up into the 
stream. I wish that I could speak effectively to all 
the busy young men here, and make them value 
those moments in their lives. None of you young 
men are so busy that you are always the slaves of 
your trades or business. You have your evenings. 
You have your Sundays. You have stray moments 
and half-hours here and there. You have your sick- 
ness now and then. Make them times for the real 
feeding of your minds and souls. Have associates 
and friends outside of the limits of your own profes- 



Make the Men Sit Down. 235 

sion, as able and intelligent young men as you can 
find, to whom life means other things from what it 
means to you, and who can help you to enlarge its 
meaning for yourself. Be interested in some pur- 
suit which will take you into quite unfamiliar fields. 
Make yourself at home in the Public Library, that 
great organ-forest of sweet and solemn and in- 
spiring sounds, which will speak to us if we come and 
sit and are hungry for its music. Let the country, 
when you can, scatter the cobwebs of the city out of 
your brain and send you back to its richer life refreshed 
and simplified. Above all, let the peace of God, the 
peace of trust and love, the peace of religion, flow in 
upon your consciousness the moment that business 
care gives it a moment's freedom. Whenever neces- 
sary thought of self gives way for an hour, how 
good it is if the thought of the Father instantly, with- 
out waiting to be summoned, takes possession of the 
child. 

And now it is time for us to see whether we can- 
not go a little deeper into our subject than we have 
gone thus far. I should do little credit to your 
thoughtfulness if I did not believe that you had felt 
the difficulty in what I have been saying. I have 
pointed out how the active life needs oftentimes to 
stop and sit down and become receptive. That is all 
true enough ; but if we state it as the sum of the 
whole matter, we feel its imperfection. It makes a 
spotted and spasmodic life, a life which is forever ex- 
pecting alternations of exhaustion and repair. " Go 
on," it seems to say, ■' live for awhile your outgoing 



236 Make the Men Sit Down, 



life, and then, when that has gone on long enough, 
stop and accumulate new strength, and then start 
out and use it," and so go on, "getting and spending;" 
and so you will surely in the end, " lay waste your 
powers." It makes spiritual supply almost like the 
dinner for which you leave your workshop, only to 
hasten back to the place of toil again when the hur- 
ried meal is done. 

There must be something better than that. The 
question inevitably rises in the mind of any active 
thinking man, Is it not possible instead of working 
and resting, to rest in working, so that in the very 
act which exhauets, I shall get my renewal and sup- 
ply ? How good that would be ! That would make 
the feeding of life by God, the divine supply of life, 
to be not like the eating of a dinner, which is excep- 
tional and an interruption of the life, but like the 
breathing of the vital air which is going on all the 
time, and is not done deliberately, or as a special act, 
but does itself, as it were, by the movement of those 
same lungs which the exercise of labor sets in mo- 
tion. 

Let us see whether we can make this plain. Here 
is a man who, we may say, is engaged in a wholly 
secular employment. He is a merchant selling 
goods. At the same time he is a distinctly and de- 
voutly Christian man. He loves Christ, and knows 
that he must have Christ for his helper and his 
friend. But all the day he is completely busy at his 
store. He knows how his life always is outgoing. He 
longs for something to come in, something diviner 



Make the Men Sit Down. 237 

and more spiritual. What can he do ? Once in 
awhile he turns aside. He shnts the door. He 
leaves the business to take care of itself. As truly 
as if he went into a desert cave, he goes apart. He 
makes his Sunday genuinely sacred. He consecrates 
his hour of prayer. What happens then? The 
blessing surely comes. The ocean hears the stopping 
of the stream, and knows its opportunity. God 
comes and feeds the docile and expectant life, and it 
goes back to counting-house and counter, stronger, 
purer, greater. That is very good. The man will 
sell goods more nobly for the peace of God which he 
has gained in the desert. But just suppose that he 
did not have to go to the desert for the peace. Sup- 
pose that he could have not merely used devoutness, 
and faith, and piety in the store, but actually gained 
them there. Suppose that in the compass of one 
single specific mercantile transaction, there could 
actually have been present the two sides of this man, 
one alert, watchful, active, standing on its feet; the 
other humble, hungry, receptive, sitting down in the 
very compass of that action before God : would not 
that surely have been better ? Would it not have 
brought the food nearer to the hunger ? Would it 
not have kept the man's unity, which it is one of the 
worst tendencies of life to divide and lose ? Would 
it not have made his business sacred and his devotion 
intensely practical at once ? 

And then is an ordinary business action possibly 
large enough to be thus at the same time the exer- 
cise of the merchant's activity and also the medium 



238 Make the Men Sit Down. 

through which God feeds the merchant's soul? Be- 
fore we give an answer to that question, we must 
stop and force ourselves to remember that a whole 
act includes its motive. An act of yours is not sim- 
ply the thing you do. It is also the reason why you 
do it. Make the conception of the act as large as 
that, and then I think it certainly may include all that 
I said. Why are you selling your goods? If with- 
out falsehood you can say, " Because it is my duty, 
in order that I may maintain my family and serve 
my generation and honor God by usefulness," then 
certainly the act opens itself and becomes a Church. 
It is the house of God. It is the gate of heaven. 
God is there in that act; and your soul doing its work 
for Him, is humbly in His presence ; and the soul can- 
not be humbly in the presence of God without being 
receptive of Him. In every act consciously and de- 
voutly done for God's sake, God gives himself to the 
soul and feeds it, in the act ; not after it and in re- 
ward of it, but in it. 

What is the reason then that our ordinary actions 
are not able to do this, at the same time to exercise 
the actor's power andto be the medium through which 
God can feed the actor's soul? Is it not simply that 
our ordinary act is not complete ? It is not the whole 
act. It is only the body of act, and not the soul. 
It is the form of the act, without the motive. That 
is the reason why it is too small to hold this inflowing 
force as well as the outgoing influence. Make your 
most simple act complete; do your most common 
daily duty from its divinest motive, and what a change 



Make the Men Sit Down. 239 

will come ! Still jour life will need days of retirement, 
when it will shut the gates upon the noisy whirl of 
action and be alone with God. But it will not be 
upon them that it will mostly depend for spiritual 
nourishment. They will be like great exceptional 
banquets and extraordinary feasts of grace. The 
daily bread of spiritual life, the ordinary feeding of 
the soul on God, which really makes its sustenance, 
will be in the perpetual doing of the works of life 
for Him. The real sitting down to be fed will be 
mysteriously identical with the most eager and 
energetic standing on the feet to do His will ! 

Behold the meeting of the effective and the recep- 
tive life. I told about the East all given to contem- 
plation and the waiting for the coming God, and 
of the West, all full of self-reliance and the stir of 
action. The Ganges and the Mississippi, what dif- 
ferent scenes of human life they see ! We might 
have seen in the same way how between two centu- 
ries of the same race's history, or between two men in 
the same century, or between two moods of the same 
man, there lies this picturesque and striking differ- 
ence. One is energetic, forever sending out force 
upon the world. The other is receptive, always 
drinking in influence from God. Such differences 
there will always be. But behind and beneath all 
such differences, there will always be this other 
truth, that in each single race, or age, or man, or act, 
if the fullest life were there, the effective and the 
receptive capacities would each be present, and the 
two would minister to one another. The Ganges and 



240 Make the Men Sit Down, 

the Mississippi, in the complete world, will have sub- 
terranean communication with each other, and the 
two together will unite to make glad the city of 
God. Rest and action in the experience of the com- 
pletest soul are not antagonistic; they are hardly 
distinct from one another. Action is the most 
refreshing rest, and rest is in some sense the most 
effective action to the soul that lives on complete 
dependence and obedience to God. 

There are few features in the life of Jesus which 
impress me more than this : the way in which his 
work and his growth, his effective and receptive life 
went on together. What he did for man and what his 
Father did for him, were not separate parts of his life. 
They were enfolded in the same experiences. True, 
there were times when he withdrew himself, and, 
leaving all activity behind, lay on the mountain 
days and nights, passive before his Father, waiting to 
be more completely filled with him. But those were 
rare, exceptional occasions. The ordinary dependence 
upon God was perfectly expressed by those words to 
his disciples, " My meat is to do the will of him 
that sent me ! " When he gave the Sermon on the 
Mount, when he calmed the tempest on the lake, when 
he raised Lazarus from the dead, we do not doubt 
that both processes were going on, enfolded in the 
completeness of each of those actions. He was sav- 
ing the world, and he was becoming more perfectly his 
Father's Son at once. And at the last, what is it that 
makes the perfect wonder of the cross ? Is it not the 
double assurance that in those agonies, under that 



Make the Men Sit Down. 241 

darkness, the world is being redeemed and the Son 
of Man is being glorified, both at once. The " It is 
finished " told of the completion of his nature and the 
completion of his work together. Nay, it is even 
more intimate than that. The completion of His na- 
ture was the completion of his work, and the comple- 
tion of his work was the completion of his nature. 
He could not have completely been the Son of God 
without saving the world, and he could not have 
completely saved the world without being complete- 
ly the Son of God. 

So labor and patience, activity and the growth 
which comes by passive suffering, ought always to 
make one single total life. Some of you will remem- 
ber how in the old church at Innsbruck, among the 
magnificent bronze people who stand about the tomb 
of the Emperor Maximilian, is the great Godfrey of 
Boulogne, the illustrious crusader. Upon his head 
he wears his helmet, and on the helmet rests a crown 
of thorns. The strange conjunction may mean many 
things. No doubt the crown of thorns is meant to 
represent the sacred cause, the rescue of the place 
of the Lord's crucifixion and burial, for which the 
soldier fought. But is not such a union of symbols 
a perpetual picture ? The helmet and the crown of 
thorns! Activity and suffering, fighting and grow- 
ing, the putting forth of energy and the drinking 
in of strength; these two were represented not as 
coming in by turns, not as chasing one another into 
and out of the life, but as abiding together, making 

one temper, filling one character. The helmet and 
1G 



242 Make the Men Sit Down. 

the crown of thorns worn together on the consecrat- 
ed head, that makes the noble, useful, growing life. 

Is not this essentially the great promise which is 
given us about the eternal blessedness? We are told 
of heaven, that there is no temple there to which 
the worshippers go up. There will be no turning 
aside to refresh the exhausted reverence and faith 
and love; no special feast times in the everlasting 
festival, but in the very acts of service the souls, all 
afire with love for Him they serve, shall drink His 
love and wisdom into their open natures. " His ser- 
vants shall serve him, and his name shall be in their 
foreheads." The effective life and the receptive life 
are one. No sweep of arm that does some work for 
God but harvests also some more of the truth of God, 
and sweeps it into the treasury of the life. 

We must anticipate heaven, and make earth as 
like to it as possible. 

May not two lessons come to us out of what I have 
said to-day ? 

The first is this. Seek your life's nourishment in 
your lifers work. Do not think that after you have 
bought or sold or studied or taught, you will go 
into your closet and open your Bible and repair the 
damage and the loss which your day's life has left 
you. Do those things certainly, but also insist that 
your buying or selling or studying or teaching shall 
itself make you brave, patient, pure aud holy ! Do 
not let your occupation pass you by, and only leave 
you the basest and poorest of its benefits, the money 
with which it fills your purse. Compel it to give 



Make the Men Sit Down, 243 

up to you the charity and faith and character and 
godliness which it has at its heart, which it hides 
charily, but which it must give to you if you insist 
upon it and are able to receive it. 

The other lesson is : Make your most restful con- 
templation and your most receptive listening at the 
lips of God, not to be mere spiritual luxuries, but to 
be forms and modes of action. Make them acts. Let 
them call your powers into play. Let them be not 
listless, but full of vigor. Let them anticipate work 
for God and service of his children so earnestly and 
eagerly, that they themselves shall be work and 
service. 

He who learns these lessons lives a life as deep 
as the ocean and as powerful. There is no tedium 
or fretfulness for him. His life catches the quality 
of the life of God. He works while it is called to- 
day, and yet he has already reached the rest which 
remaineth for God's people. Such lives may God 
help us to live. 



SERMON XIV. 

WtmXinm. 

"He hath made everything beautiful in his time." 
Ecclesiastes iii. 11. 

FITNESS or timeliness is one strong element in 
every idea of beauty. A place for everything 
and everything in its place, a time for everything 
and everything in its time, these are the principles 
that lie at the bottom of that enjoyment of things 
which we call a sense of beauty. There is nothing 
which has such absolute self-contained loveliness 
that we can say of it that it would be lovely every- 
where and always. Put it into certain surround- 
ings, throw certain lights upon it and it would seem 
ugly. The writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes re- 
verses this truth, gives us the other side of it. He 
says that there is nothing so essentially unbeautiful 
that, put into its true place and time, it would not 
become beautiful. The disorder of the universe, the . 
things that shock us and distress us and disgust us 
in it, come not from the essential badness of the 
material of the universe, but from its dislocations. 

It is in the disarrangement of what needs arrange- 
244 



Timeliness. 245 



ment. It is the stoppage of the machine "by some 
part of its own machinery which has wrenched itself 
out of position and got between the wheels. It is 
the spoiling of the picture by the casting of the 
strong color here which was needed there. These 
are what make the mischief in the world and what 
destroy its beauty. Our own instincts of beauty 
recognize the law. They demand harmony and 
timeliness and fitness. They are not chained to any 
conventional standards. They are willing to see 
things in new arrangements, provided they are rec- 
ognized when they are seen as natural and fit 
arrangements. But the shock and startle which 
comes from the sight of unnatural arrangements, from 
seeing things out of place, this the pure taste dis- 
criminates at once, and knows that what creates it is 
not beautiful but grotesque, and that the pleasure, 
if it gives any, is not healthy. 

The necessity of timeliness or fitness to the truest 
beauty, and the beauty of everything in its true 
time and place, these then are the two sides of the 
truth of which I wish to speak to-day. I will not 
speak abstractly. I will come closely enough to 
practical matters of our daily life. It is a truth 
which has its applications everywhere. It touches 
what we may almost dare to call the responsibility 
of God. If the good and evil, the benefit and harm 
of things is not in things themselves, but in the places 
where they are put, then not on God who made the 
things of which the world is full, but upon man, who 
with his free will is always shifting things to suit him- 



246 Timeliness, 



self, must lie the blame of the injury things do him. 
You lay your own stumbling block in your own way. 
God made the block indeed, but He made it for a 
part of the strength and beauty of the walls. It was 
you who dragged it down to the floor and insisted 
upon laying where you could stumble over it. 

And again it touches the old question of failure or 
success in life. It lets us see why it is very often 
not the best furnished but the best arranged life that 
succeeds, not the richest but the most timely life; 
which is something that so often puzzles us. 

And again it knits things into an interdependence 
with one another which is pleasing to the human 
mind. It rescues the universe from fragmentariness 
and shows us how "all is needed by every one, 
nothing is good or fair alone." In all these ways this 
truth, that everything is beautiful in its time, and 
nothing is beautiful out of its time, comes close home 
to our lives. 

And one thing is very striking about this truth, 
which indeed is characteristic always of the highest 
truths, that it becomes more manifestly true in 
things in proportion as their nature rises. It is less 
manifest in the lower, and more manifest in the 
higher natures. See what I mean. Everything in 
the world must be in its true place and time, or it is 
not beautiful. That is true from the lowest to the 
highest; only with the lowest it is not easy to dis- 
cover it. It does not seem to matter where the peb- 
ble lies, on this side of the road or on the other. It 
may indeed do sad mischief out of its place ; but its 



Timeliness. 247 



place is a wide one. It may lie in many spots and 
do no harm, and seem to show all the beauty and 
render all the use of which it is capable. But the 
things of higher nature are more fastidious in their 
demands. The plant must have its proper soil to 
feed its roots upon, or its bright flowers lose their 
beauty, and even there, only in one short happy sea- 
son of the year is it in its glory, while the pebble 
keeps its lustre always. Higher still, comes the ani- 
mal, and he has more needs which must be met, more 
arrangements that must be made, a more definite 
place in which he must be set, before he can do his 
best. Some sort of a home to live in, some faint be- 
ginning of society, some growth and education, bring 
him to his best beasthood. And then highest of all 
comes man, and with his highest life comes the com- 
pletest dependence upon circumstances. He is the 
least independent creature on the earth. The most 
beautiful in his right time and place, he is the most 
wretched and miserable out of it. He is the most 
liable to be thrown out of place of all the creatures. 
He must have all the furnishings of life, friendships, 
family, ambitions, cultures of every kind, or his best 
is not attained. 

And this same law holds between different kinds 
of men. The highest natures are most dependent 
upon timeliness and fitness. They must act at the 
right moment. There are such things as right mo- 
ments for them. Have you not been often struck by 
seeing how a commonplace and ordinary man will 
fall in with the world anywhere, and make himself 



248 Timeliness. 



at home and be at ease and use his powers very sat- 
isfactorily, while a man far his superior will stand 
waiting and awkward, apparently quite unable to 
get to work, until, by-and-by, all of a sudden, his op- 
portunity arrives, and instinctively he knows it and 
falls to work, and in an hour has done more than the 
other did in days. It is not mere fastidiousness. 
It is not conceit. Fastidiousness and conceit are the 
shams and imitations of which this is the genuine. 
Fastidiousness betrays itself by its self-consciousness 
and by its unwillingness to step in, even when the 
true time has come. We all know this difference of 
men. There are men about us who we feel might 
have lived at any age from Abraham's time down to 
ours, and they would have been just as much at home 
in any of the strange old centuries as they are here. 
A little change of dress, a little different manners, a 
different language, and that would be all the altera- 
tion. But there are other men whom you cannot 
transfer. They belong here and now. You are sure 
that in any other time their lives must have been 
hampered and dumb. Now they find voice and 
power, because their time is come. 

When the great feast was ready at Jerusalem, and 
the brethren of Jesus were going up from Nazareth, 
as they went every year, they urged Jesus to go with 
them. And his answer was, " My time is not yet 
come, but your time is always ready." There was 
something so sad and so noble in his words. They, 
with no recognized mission, might go when and 
where they would. They, with no burden on their 



Timeliness. 249 



shoulders, might walk freely over the whole earth. 
But he, with his task, his duty, his Father's name to 
glorify, his brethren's souls to s^ive, the kingdom of 
heaven to set up, he must wait till the door opened. 
He could walk only where the way was wide enough 
for him to pass with his burden. Nothing can be 
farther from the coveted ideal which hangs before 
the eyes of multitudes of our young men, the easy, 
ready man of the world, who is at home anywhere, 
with a conscience that can pass through any crack, 
with convictions that can turn to any color, with the 
self-possession that succeeds everywhere ; nothing 
can be farther from him than Jesus was, with his 
clear purposes and strong truth and mission of God. 
O that you all could learn that ! Such universal 
popularity, such universal adaptability is not the 
highest character or life. As you emphasize your 
life, you must localize and define it. The more truly 
and earnestly you come to do anything, the more 
clearly you will see that you cannot do everything. 
He who is truly good must be good for something. 
To be good for everything is to be good for nothing. 
The strength of a life makes up for and glorifies its 
specialness. The dog with his kennel full mocks at 
the lion with his solitary whelp. u Yes, only one, but 
a lion," answers the proud beast. Always the higher 
a life is, the more it is beautiful in its place, and can 
be beautiful nowhere else. 

It belongs then to the highest and most gifted 
lives, to seek their places in the world. It is the 
prerogative of their superiority. Surely it would be 



250 Timeliness. 



good for men if they could learn this early. It 
would scatter many delusions. It would dissipate 
the folly of universal genius. The tendency of our 
time is to special education, to find what every man 
is fit for and to train him specially for that. It may 
be carried to excess. It may be made too narrow. 
In their desire for special culture men may cut off 
those streams of education which, flowing in from 
distant regions upon every side, supply and feed the 
current of the special life. The special life may be 
too narrowly conceived. That is of course the dan- 
ger. But still we cannot help rejoicing in the in- 
creasing prominence of the idea that every being 
whom the world contains has his true place, written 
in the very make of his nature, and that to find that 
place and fill it is success for him. To help him find 
that place and make him fit to fill ic, is the duty of 
his educators in all their various degrees. 

Such an idea is always tending to become religious, 
is always on the brink of faith. It does not seem 
possible for men to permanently hold it and yet be 
satisfied with a chance-governed world. Who made 
the nature and the work for one another? Who 
touched the unborn soul and the undone task with 
such harmonious colors that, when by-and-by they 
met, their colors recognized each other, and blended 
into a beauty of active life, which all the world could 
see ? The whole idea is full of God. Men may state 
it as atheistically as they will, they cannot get God 
out of it. Like every assertion of order in the uni- 
verse, it must ultimately be an assertion of Him. 



Timeliness, 251 



And then again, the constant holding of such an 
idea about a man's own life is always tending to 
make a man personally religious. The man who 
thinks he is an accident, and has no place, grows 
flippant with his life. But all that made the lives 
of Moses and David, John and Paul and Luther, seri- 
ous, responsible, devout, comes to the humblest man 
who is able to believe in a true place, a true calling 
for himself. It must come to the whole world, mak- 
ing it lofty, earnest, tuning its whole music to a 
higher key, when this truth of the beauty, the neces- 
sity of timeliness shall grow everywhere clear. 

So seek your place and fill it. You know the sat- 
isfactory feeling that we all have when one of the 
universal men who has been good at everything and 
so good for nothing, who has been slipping about 
loosely over the surface of life, in everybody's way, 
for years, at last suddenly finds the hollow he was 
made for and drops into it and fits it. It is an im- 
mense satisfaction and relief. Perhaps it seems at 
first as if he had disappeared ; but by-and-by we 
find that he has been taken up by the great system 
of life and made a portion of it. His movement be- 
comes orderly, makes part of the universal rhythm. 
He has found his time and place, and become beauti- 
ful. There are children in your households, boys in 
your schools, the very best boys there, who make the 
most trouble because, being the best boys, the larg- 
est, strongest characters, they most need to find 
their place. They most truly have a place to find. 
The average commonplace boy fits in almost any- 



252 Timeliness, 



where, and makes no trouble. But in that grace- 
less, awkward, interfering character there is the 
real pivot, which if you can help into its right place, 
will help to hold the structure of the world together 
and let many other characters revolve upon it. 

So much we say of men, of human beings in or 
out of their true place and time. But let us now 
pass on to something else. Let us go on to see how 
everything, all the events of life, all of God's dis- 
pensations, get their real beauty or ugliness from the 
times in which they come to us or in which we 
come to them. We are always giving things abso- 
lute arbitrary characters. This thing is good, that 
thing is bad, we say; but really badness or goodness, 
beauty or ugliness are not in things themselves, but 
in the ways those things relate themselves to us. 
Look at trouble, look at temptation. They are not 
beautiful, surely, we say. The calm soul, living its 
peaceful life upon the sunny plain, gathering its 
flowers, singing its gentle songs, sees stalking up 
towards it, hiding the sunlight from it, casting its 
shadow far before itself, the great figure of a com- 
ing woe. Does it seem beautiful ? Can the arms 
open to welcome it ? See how the form withers 
and seems to shrink, drops in upon itself with terror 
as the trouble comes on pitilessly. But by-and-by 
when it has come, when the soul smitten by it has 
had to lay hold with new strength on Christ, when 
the superficial things of life have all been blown 
away and the real precious things of life have been 
displayed anew under the tempest — what then ? Is 



Timeliness. 253 



there no beauty in the trouble then ? Ask many a 
heart who never knew what spiritual beauty was un- 
til it saw it under the form of timely sorrow. 

Even punitive sorrow, punishment, has a beauty 
about it which men are not slow to feel. When a 
man has been sinning and sinning on, and when at 
last an exposure and pain comes, and then by the 
shame and purification of that suffering another life 
begins,- is there anything more beautiful than that 
pain standing there " in his place " between the old 
life and the new, between the sin and the restoral ? 
It is beautiful with reference to the past. It satis- 
fies man's feeling about the necessary consequence 
of sin, and it is beautiful with reference to the future. 
It clears the field for the new things that are to 
come. 

If there is one thing especially of which many 
people cannot possibly believe that under any 
circumstances it should seem beautiful, I suppose 
it must be death. That must be always dreadful. 
Men seldom see any misery in life so great as to 
outweigh the misery of leaving it. But yet it comes 
to all of us that He who made death made it 
like all things else to be beautiful in his place and 
time. When a life has lived its days out in 
happiness, grown old with constantly accumulating 
joys, and then at last, before decay has touched it 
or the ground grows soft under its feet, the door 
opens and it enters into the new youth of eternity: 
when a young man has tried his poAvers here and 
dedicated them to. God, and then is called to the full 



254 Timeliness. 



use of their perfected strength in the very presence 
of the God whom he has loved: when a man has 
lived for his brethren, and the time comes that his 
life cannot help them any longer, but his death can 
put life into dead truths and send enthusiasm into 
fainting hearts: when death comes as rest to a man 
who is tired with a long fight, or as victory to a 
man who leaves his enemies baffled behind him on 
the shore of time, in all these times is not death 
beautiful? "Nothing in all his life became this 
man like his leaving it," they said of one who died. 

Look at the death of Christ. Men said, u It is terri- 
ble. It is disgraceful." Christ himself shrank and 
trembled at it. It was what we call a violent, an un- 
timely death, but it was really in its true time, and 
all the world has felt its beauty. For Jesus it was 
victory and peace. For the world it was salvation 
and new life. On the evening of Good Friday, in 
spite of all their pain and disappointment, His mother 
and disciples must have begun to feel already how 
beautiful it was. 

We transport ourselves to God's standpoint and 
imagine how He must think about it all. To Him, see- 
ing the whole, seeing both worlds, the passage from 
one to the other must be as natural as is the passage 
from one period of this life to another. A man may 
be unprepared for it. and so the passage from boy- 
hood into manhood may be a dreadful, ruinous thing. 
A man may be unprepared for it, and so the passage 
from time into eternity may be dreadful and ruinous, 
like any other passage, but in itself not one more 



1 {wellness. 255 



than the other. One, like the other, is the summons 
of God, to come on, to come up, to something richer, 
larger, more complete.' 

One law applies in full to the coming of different 
stages in the life of man. Each period of life is 
beautiful in its time. Old age is beautiful when 
men are really old, and youth when men are really 
young; but everybody feels the lack of beauty Avhen 
the character of either period is transferred into 
the years of the other. A precocious boy and a 
young old man alike repel us with an incongruity. 
This is why boys shun their companion who is sol- 
emn and wise beyond his years, and men laugh at a 
man who does not know how to grow old, but keeps 
the ways of youthfulness long after the freshness of 
youth which gave them all their charm is past. It 
seems as if life might all be so simple and so beauti- 
ful, so good to live, so good to look at, if we could 
only think of it as one long journey, where every day's 
march had its own separate sort of beauty to travel 
through ; and so if we could go on clinging to no 
past, accepting every new present as it comes, find- 
ing everything beautiful in its time, and suiting our- 
selves to each new beauty with continual growth. 
And that can come to pass in the soul that really 
loves and lives in a living, loving God. 

There are continual applications of our truth — the 
necessity of timeliness to beauty — in the religious life. 
" Everything beautiful in his time," says God. Then 
each experience of Christian life is good and comely 
in its true place, when it comes in the orderly 



256 Timeliness. 



sequences of Christian growth, and only there; not 
beautiful wnen it comes artificially, forced in where 
it does not belong. It would do many Christians 
great good to learn that truth. A young Christian, 
just beginning the new life, earnest and glowing and 
immature, loving Christ deeply, but not having- yet 
fathomed his helpfulness, hears some old saint tell- 
ing of the calm trust in the Saviour which has grown 
strong in long experience of guidance and mercy. 
The ardent boy, full of his hopes and fears, gazes 
upon that tranquil peace, and is fascinated by it. 
He wonders why it is not his. Perhaps he tries to 
make believe that it is his, to drill himself into an 
imitation of it. But no ! Everything in its time ! 
That is the grace of ripened life. It will not come 
to the young experience. The efforts to make it 
come, the imitations of it, are unreal and bad. 

And so again the other way. The aged Christian, 
full of the peace of eventide, with the long shadows 
lying back upon the life that he has lived, will often 
grow anxious and discouraged because the glow and 
thrill and eagerness of his first faith has passed 
away. This simply trusting Christ and resting in 
his love, seems dull and spiritless, beside the excited 
fervor of his first conversion. And so with some 
galvanic movement, he tries to reproduce the quick 
excited activity which he remembers. 

So the soul that God has been training into happy 
confidence sees another soul which God has been 
shaking with alarms, and reproaches itself because 
it is so tranquil, fears because it cannot fear. 



Timeliness. 



257 



So the soul which God is training in solitude 
thinks its life wasted because it is cut off from 
society, and the soul that God keeps in the very 
midst of its fellows sighs for the joy and culture of 
being alone. 

If we could only know that in its time only is any 
Christian mood or condition beautiful, and that God 
only knows its time ! When the day is over the 
stars will come, and then it is good to see them; but 
to see them before that, in the sunlight, you must go, 
men say, down to the bottom of a well, where you do 
not belong, which is unnatural and unhealthy. When 
we have done with earth the heaven will come; and, 
till that, only such heaven — and it is not a little — as is 
possible upon the dear old earth. 

We ought to learn everywhere not to value moods 
for their own sakes, and so not to try to produce 
them. They are mere symptoms. Not symptoms, 
but disease and health, are the important things. 
People are always setting their hearts on one partic- 
ular grace or quality, and thinking that it is the per- 
fect character, and so cultivating it and practicing 
it in the same form under all circumstances indis- 
criminately. That is what makes the one-sided and 
misshapen men that we see everywhere. One man 
says, "Self-reliance is a noble, manly thing," and 
so his whole notion of strong life is to be self-reliant 
everywhere, and he becomes totally undocile and 
arrogant. He is as self-reliant in forming his ideas 
about the truths of God and eternity, as he is in de- 
ciding about a turn of the market or the chances of 
17 



258 Timeliness. 



a bargain. His self-reliance ceases to be respectable, 
and grows distressing when it stands up unabashed 
in the presence of the most sacred mysteries. 

Or, it may be, doubt and hesitation seem beautiful 
to you — as sometimes indeed they are — but you take 
it for granted that they are always good, and by-and- 
by, you are weak where you ought to be strong; you 
are hesitating where you ought to be acting. And 
all the world is sneering at you, and you deserve its 
sneers. 

Or levity? which has its graceful places among 
pleasant trifling things, is brought in among sa- 
cred and awful truths, and how ugly its jesting face 
and tinsel dress and tinkling bells appear ! 

Or subtlety, which has its province in curious 
questions of the intellect, begins to meddle with the 
clear questions of the conscience, with principle, 
with right and wrong, and it is disagreeable and re- 
pulsive. 

No ! no one mood is the whole character. Truth, 
courage, these are universal; but the moods that 
these create are always changing. The same truth- 
fulness which makes a man bold at one time, will 
make him fearful at another. What we need is to 
be simply courageous and truthful men, and let the 
forms in which our manhood shows itself freely vary 
with the varying circumstances, each beautiful in its 
own time. We may lose what men call consistency, 
but we shall keep what is better — truth and free- 
dom, without which there can be no growth. 

Again, it seems as if this truth of ours lav at the 



Timeliness. 259 



bottom of any clear notion about the character of sin. 
We say that we are sinful, but really we are always 
passing over the essential sinfulness into the things 
around us. It is these wicked things that make us 
wicked. But here comes up our truth, that there are 
no wicked things ; that wickedness is not in things, 
but in the displacement and misuse of things; that 
there is nothiug which, kept in its true place and put 
to its true use, is not beautiful and good. Here is a 
man who says his business makes him selfish. Cow- 
ard that he is, he meanly lays the blame of his mean 
life upon his merchandise and ledgers. But no such 
pretense will pass. In the next store to him there 
is a brother merchant, who out of just the same bus- 
iness, has been growing charitable and generous and 
larger-hearted every year. Here is a woman who 
says that society is responsible for her frivolousness ; 
that no one can be purely earnest who lives in the 
midst of this fashionable world. But some other 
woman by her side confutes her, for she has shown 
how full social life may fill the character of what is 
best and sacredest. Here is a man who tells me 
that no student of physical science can be cognizant 
of spiritual life or reverent of spiritual forces. On 
his rocks and bones he lays the blame of his godless- 
ness. But some reverent disciple of a spiritual mas- 
ter convicts him, as he shows how from the deepest 
study of the laws of God, the soul may come to an 
ever profounder faith in the God of law. Tn every 
case we wretchedly impute sin to things. But when 
we once are taught that things cannot be sinful — that 



260 Timeliness. 



sin is a quality which can only belong to wills — 
then back upon our wills falls the stigma which we 
have tried to cast off on the inanimate material with 
which we have to do. The much abused things seem 
to lift up their heads and fling back the disgrace 
which we have tried so ignominiously to shift from 
ourselves to them. The shops cry out indignantly, 
"We do not make the misers." Society declares, "I 
do not make the triflers." The rocks and bones pro- 
test, " We do not make the atheists." They all hold 
up the noble uses to which they might have been 
put, and say, " Who was it that chose to prostitute 
us and degrade us?" Back on the wills of men, 
where it belongs, falls the responsibility of sin, and 
the convicted soul, instead of going about any longer 
complaining that God has put it into such a wicked 
world, and abusing the sinfulness of things, owns 
its own wickedness, and in clear-sighted, manly pen- 
itence cries out, " God be merciful to me a sinner." 

This last idea has its encouraging and hopeful side. 
The soul, wanting to get away from sin, has not to 
make its escape out of a wilderness of sinful things, 
in whose midst it is impossible to be good. r i he 
sin is in the man himself. He must be changed, and 
then these things about him, just the same things 
still, change also with his altered life. He finds 
them capable of unguessed uses. The hammer with 
which he once destroyed, and in which it seemed to him 
as if the spirit of destruction lay, he finds now yield- 
ing easily to his new desire to build. How deep the 
old story of Genesis goes ! The earth which sin 



Timeliness. 261 



turned to a wilderness, holiness turns back again 
into a garden! For sin and holiness are not in things, 
but in souls ; and all things are beautiful in the time 
when a soul uses them for holy uses with a loving, 
humble, and obedient life. 

Let this be then the word with which we close. 
The human soul sits at the centre of everything, and 
Christ sits at the centre of the human soul. If he 
changes us, then everything will be changed to us. 
" He that sitteth upon the throne saith, Behold I 
make all things new ! " If the world is ugly and 
bitter and cruel to you: if circumstances taunt and 
persecute you: if everything you touch is a strain 
and a temptation, do not stand idly wishing that 
the world were changed. The change must be in. 
you. To the new heart all things shall be new. The 
new man shall see already the new heaven and the 
new earth. If any man be in Christ, he is a new 
creature; and the new creature is immediately in 
the new creation. Some of you know already by 
daily experience what that means. And for all of 
you, it waits to be revealed, if you will let Christ do 
His work in you. 



SERMON XV. 

%\t $ wwrt M\xt& in Qmvm. 

"For my sword shall be bathed in heaven." — Isaiah xxxiv. 5. 

IN a magnificent passage of his prophecy, Isaiah is 
denouncing the anger of God against the ene- 
mies of His people and His purposes. Jehovah Him- 
self speaks in the glowing verse. The imagery is 
tremendous. "Their slain shall be cast out and 
their stink shall come up out of their carcasses, and 
the mountains shall be melted with their blood." 
How sharp and clear and definite is the Bible pic- 
ture of the wrath of God ! We, in these modern 
days, dwell most upon the inevitable issues which are 
involved in the very nature of things. The good 
moves against the evil and must in the end destroy 
it. It is a vehement, impetuous and fiery movement, 
but it is abstract. It is the fight of principle w r ith 
principle. The Bible is all different from that. "God 
is angry with the wicked every day." It is a great 
and passionate Person, whose feeling fills the earth 
with tumult, who in rage and indignation sets right 
the evils of the earth and punishes the sons of men 

for their wrong-doing. 
262' 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 263 

We must be fully in the power of this intense per- 
sonal conception of God before we can enter into the 
force of the words which I have chosen for my text 
this morning. God is abont to smite the wickedness 
of the earth. His sword is in His hand. And then, 
as a part of the terrible announcement, there comes 
these words : u My sword shall be bathed in 
heaven." What does that mean ? It draws back 
the curtain which separates the visible world from 
the invisible. It reveals celestial regions in which 
there are also great struggles going on. It lifts up 
our eyes to the grander movements of the vast world 
of spirits. And then it declares that the sword 
which is to be used in fighting what seems to be the 
petty wars of the Hebrews and the Edomites, is the 
same sword which has been used in these celestial 
conflicts; that the means and instruments of right- 
eousness upon the earth must be the same with the 
means and instruments of righteousness in the 
heavens. 

This is the meaning, I think, of the great words, 
" my sword shall be bathed in heaven." Another 
glowing translation of the same words makes them 
read, " my sword has become intoxicated in heaven." 
It is not an uncommon figure, this strong picture 
of the intoxicated instruments of war. Tou remem- 
ber the song of Moses in Deuteronomy, where Jeho- 
vah is heard declaring, " I will make my arrows 
drunk with blood." You remember how God in the 
prophecy of Jeremiah declares, " This is the day of 
the Lord God of Hosts, a day of vengeance, that he 



264 The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 

may avenge him of his adversaries, and the sword 
shall devour, and it shall be satiate and made drunk 
with their blood." 

Here then is God pictured as the mighty conquer- 
or who on other fields has already subdued his ene- 
mies with the only weapons which it is possible for 
him to use, with the absolute righteousness and truth. 
With those same weapons, all ablaze and living and 
eager from the fight in which they had been engaged, 
he declares that he will fight his battles on earth. 
It shall be a sword bathed in heaven which shall 
" come down upon Idumea." 

We pause a moment and let ourselves think of 
this suggested vision of the universe all full of moral 
struggle. We can know nothing of what that strug- 
gle is in other worlds than ours. The fields of life are 
larger than we see, larger than all the history of 
man has told. Wherever there are beings of free 
will, there, whether it be in far-off stars or in the 
depths of space beyond the farthest star itself, there 
must be struggle, the possibilities of evil, the choice 
between the evil and the good. And in no part of 
His universe can God be passive. Everywhere He 
must be the foe of the evil and the friend of the good. 
Everywhere therefore throughout the great per- 
plexed tumultuous universe, we can see the flashing 
of His sword. " His sword ! " we say, and that must 
mean His nature uttering itself in His own form of 
force. Nothing can be in His sword which is not in 
His nature. And so the sword of God in heavenly 
regions must mean perfect thoroughness and per- 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 265 

feet justice contending against evil and self-will, and 
bringing about everywhere the ultimate victory of 
righteousness and truth. 

Out of this celestial, this universal struggle the 
sword of God, yet hot and fresh from the blows 
which it had struck, came down among the Jews to 
fight for them with Edom. That was the message 
which Isaiah brought. It was good both for Edom 
and for Israel that it should be clearly known to be 
the sword bathed in the heavens, the same force 
which was engaged in the eternal battles, which was 
to fight for the chosen people and against their en- 
emy. The enemy needed to know it in order that 
they might be sure that the sword's work would be 
thorough, that there would be no sparing as long as 
there was any wickedness to be destroyed. The 
chosen people needed to know it, that they might 
understand that even for them God could not and 
would not fight otherwise than as God; that there 
would be no mere favoritism, nor any tolerance of 
means or methods which were undivine. That ev- 
ery struggle of the people of God against evil in this 
world must be fired with eternal principles, must be 
instinct with thoroughness and with justice; that is 
the plain prosaic meaning of the word of God to 
Isaiah which declared, " My sword shall be bathed 
in heaven." 

You see then, I think, what it is of which I wish 
to preach to you this morning. It is the truth that 
all the true battles of the earth really are God's bat- 
tles, and are to be fought only in God's spirit and 



266 The Sword Bathed in Heaven, 

God's way. The old history of Israel and Edom sinks 
back into a parable. All that history was a crude 
and elementary utterance of the great truth that 
there must ever be, so long as the world remains im- 
perfect and is struggling towards perfection, two 
parts of the world, one of which is God's and one of 
which is not. The chosen people, the people of the 
covenant, have passed away. They have fallen from 
their high estate. They no longer stand above their 
fellow-men, throned in the favoritism of God. But 
what that chosen people represented is perpetual. 
There always is in the world some part of the world 
consecrated to the struggle to make the world 
divine. It is not limited by the geography of a 
nation. It is not handed down to son from father. 
It is that part of the general humanity, that part of 
any race, nay, that part of any man — for even the 
individual life may be divided between God and the 
enemy of God — it is that part of human nature 
which is consecrated to God, and trying to do his 
will. That is the everlasting Israel. That in the 
Christian constitution is the correspondent of what 
Judaism, the idea of the chosen people, was under 
the system which the New Testament describes. 
In more spiritual ways therefore, with less for- 
mality, more flexibly and freely, all that is said 
of God's relation to the Judaism of the Old Tes- 
tament, must be the picture and the parable of 
the relation which God holds to all struggle after 
goodness, all effort of noble and devoted life every- 
where and always. It is in the light of this idea 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 267 

that such texts as this out of Isaiah really become 
ours. 

The first point, then, is that all good struggle in 
the world is really God's battle, and ought to recog- 
nize itself as such. A young man sets out from 
college determined to do what he can to help set 
right the evils which are in the world. The ordi- 
nary careers which attract men have no attraction 
for him. He does not care to be rich, or perhaps 
he is rich already. At any rate, he takes his life 
in Ids hand and freely, genuinely, gives it to his 
fellow-men. What a tumult it is into which he casts 
himself, what a disorder, what a crossing and re- 
crossing of interests, what a snarl of difficult prob- 
lems ! It is like trying to push back the sea, which 
eludes you at every instant and with its fluid mass 
is as solid as the rock itself. But can we not see at 
once what a difference it will make to this young 
worker against evil if he is really able to think of 
the great fight in which he is engaged not merely 
as his fight but as God's fight; as his fight because 
it is God's fight and he is God's ? Suppose that he 
is large enough, religious enough, to look abroad 
and see God gradually occupying the earth with 
the eternal principles of his righteousness. Every 
special victory of human progress, the victory over 
slavery, the victory over superstition, the victory 
over social wrong, nay even the victory over tough 
matter, the subduing of the hard stuff of nature to 
spiritual uses, each of these is but a footstep in the 
great onward march of God taking possession of 



268 The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 

His own. Must it not make a difference to the 
young reformer whether he is able to think of his 
struggle thus, or whether he is able merely to think 
of himself as the empirical student of political 
economy or social science, or as the expression of 
an instinctive human sympathy ? The poor are 
God's poor. The slave is God's freeman. This op- 
pressive institution is a blot on God's earth. Surely 
if he catches that meaning in it all, his whole strug- 
gle must be intensified and purified. His struggle 
may still keep the other truths and motives, but it 
surrounds them all with this larger and loftier one. 
Especially two things must come as the result of 
such a consciousness — the spirit of thoroughness and 
the spirit of justice. The young man really count- 
ing his struggle God's, must determine never to be 
satisfied until the victory is complete, and he must 
shrink from and refuse every temptation to use any 
weapons except the weapons of righteousness in a 
battle which belongs not merely to himself but to 
the Lord of all righteousness and truth. 

Certain it is that in all ages this conviction has 
been at the heart of all the most earnest work that 
the world has seen. The reformers who have really 
done the work have been those who have dared to 
call their work a work of God. It has been the voice 
of God in their ears, it has been the sword of God 
flashing at their side which has made them coura- 
geous as fire and persistent as iron. 

May not one plead with any generous young heart 
which thus is set upon the fight with sin and error, 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 269 

that it should lift itself up at the very outset, and 
dare to count its tight a fight of God. Do not satisfy 
yourself with mere considerations of economy or mere 
impulses of humanity. Both are good. But greater 
than both is the enthusiastic sense of confederacy 
with God. Fight your battle for Him, with Him. 
So you shall fight it most persistently, most purely. 
Fight it with the sword bathed in heaven, and so you 
shall make it victorious, and grow strong and great 
yourself in fighting it. 

I like to trace how a great truth like this applies even 
to what we call the most common and least spiritual 
things. I have already suggested that it seems to 
me to apply even to man's conflict with the obstinate 
world of matter, his battle with the stubborn stone 
and wood on which he has to exercise his skill. 
That is a never-ending conflict. The human mind 
is meeting the obtuse substance of the earth at every 
mechanic's bench, in every artist's studio, wherever 
the railroad is piercing the mountain or the steam- 
ship plows the ocean. Is it not true of all art and 
of all artisanship that thoroughness and truthfulness 
are what we need ; the refusal to slight work and the 
refusal to attempt any results except by legitimate, 
and honest, and appropriate means ? And is it not 
true also that thoroughness and truthfulness in 
any work of art or artisanship must come not 
from economy but from principle, not from the 
sense that they alone can really produce the effect, 
but from the profound conviction that, whatever be 
the effect which they produce, they alone are right, 



270 The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 

and worthy for a man to rise ? This is the faculty 
of genius. And all religious action ought to have, 
must have, some of the quality of genius in it. 
Every work of art, and every work of artisanship 
which has, as all artisanship ought to have, some- 
thing of the spirit of art about it, must be kept pure, 
noble, unmercenary and ideal by its constant relation 
to and consciousness of first principles, which are 
indeed nothing but the ideas of God. 

This is hardly more than suggestion. Think 
again of the more serious struggle, the struggle with 
ignorance and error and with wrong ideas and faiths. 
There are two different views which may inspire the 
combatant with error. He may think of error as 
mischievous, or he may abhor and dread error for 
itself, apart from its consequences, as an intrusion 
and a misery in a world whose vital atmosphere is 
truth. Is it not clear what a different thing his 
fight will be, according as he takes one or the other 
of these views ? If he takes the first view he will be 
liable to limit his fight with error by his perception 
of its mischievousness. The error which he does 
not happen to think mischievous he will tolerate or 
ignore. There is no thoroughness in that. And he 
will also be too apt to fight a mischievous error with 
what seems to be a less mischievous error, and 
to do evil that good may come. How much of that 
the world has seen ! " I know this fight of mine is 
not conducted on the highest ground, but still this 
thing I am trying to set up, bad as it is, is not 
nearly so bad as what it seeks to destroy. Let me 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 271 

defeat this lie with a lesser lie, this sham with a 
less harmful sham." There is no bathing of the 
sword in heaven there. To strike for absolute truth, 
to tolerate no falsehood, however useful for the time 
it seems, that is not possible unless the man counts 
his fight God's fight and despises any method which 
it is not worthy of God and of the Son of God to use. 
The same is true of the fight with sin. Think of 
sin as a mistake, or as an inconvenience, and you 
stand in great danger, first, of compromising with it, 
and second, of using low and even sinful methods 
of opposing it. But think of sin as a frightful 
wrong in itself, a blot and curse in the universe of 
God, and you grow at once absolutely intolerant of 
it, and at the same time watchfully anxious about the 
nature of the weapons which you shall use to fight 
it with. How often has even the Christian Church 
fought sin with sin ! How often has the selfishness 
which looked to an eternal luxury and privilege in 
heaven, been arrayed against the selfishness which 
was hungry for meat, or thirsty for drink, here upon 
the earth ! How often has insincere profession been 
offered as the medicine for doubt ! How many men 
have been transformed from cold indifference to hot 
partisanship, and thereby seemed to have been made 
religious ! How many revivals have been sensational 
and superficial and demoralizing ! The fury of per- 
secution called in to kill out heresy — what is that 
but the sword bathed in hell, the sword drunk with 
the evil passions of the worst humanity ! And 
everywhere it would be possible to show that such 



272 The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 

horrible misuse of weapons came from a misconcep- 
tion of the nature of the enemy. Only, my dear 
friends, when we see sin as God sees it, only then 
can we be sure of using no weapons that are not 
divine for its removal. Only when pity for it joins 
with horror at it in our hearts, as they join in the 
heart of God, each keeping the other strong and 
pure, only then can we go out to meet it with a per- 
fect determination, bound never to lay down our arms 
so long as there is any sin left in the world ; and at 
the same time, with an absolute conviction that no 
impatience to rid the world of sin must tempt us 
for a moment to use any means for its destruction 
which are not pure and just ; an absolute conviction 
that it is better that sin should be left master of the 
field, than that it should be fought with sin. 

Oh, how the history of brave men whose lives 
have been long fights with wickedness, have borne 
terrible testimony of what a hard thing it is to get 
that conviction and to keep it. how full of faith 
the man must be who sees a giant evil stalking 
through the land, ruining human lives by the mil- 
lion, and knows how by some act or policy which is 
not true and sound and pure he might arrest that 
evil, and save precious lives, and yet withholds his 
hand and says, " I cannot." There is no struggle lor 
a man like that, no agony so deep, no test of bra- 
very so searching. The world stands by and plies 
its well-worn maxims, " Of two evils choose the 
least," "A half loaf is better than no bread." " Nay, 
but my sword must be bathed in heaven,"' the soul 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven.. 273 

replies, and I will not stir until each blow may have 
in it the strength of a conscience void of offence. 

Thank God, if the waiting and inaction has indeed 
been of this noble sort, the time is sure to come when 
the long delay is more than justified. The time comes 
when, without a hesitation or misgiving, the soldier 
of God sees that he may strike, and may call every 
good power to witness that he does right in striking. 
Then it is evident that his plunging of his sword in 
the eternal righteousness has not merely made it 
powerless for evil but has made it fiery for good. 
Then men who called him coward because he would 
not strike at the wrong time, stand by in amazement 
as they see him harvesting the field with every great 
sweep of his unhesitating arm. For now he is a true 
Sir Galahad. 

"His strength is as the strength of ten 
Because his heart is pure." 

O my dear friends, never let yourselves do evil that 
good may come. If you do, you hinder the coming 
of the real, the perfect good in its due time. Never 
try to set a wrong right by another wrong. You arc 
only putting off the day when the true right shall be 
established. Never plot villany against a villain; 
never comfort affliction with a falsehood; never try to 
silence error with an argument which yon do not be- 
lieve; never fight God's battle with any weapon of 
the devil. Far rather would He have you stand aside 
useless, and let Him fight His own battle. It is not 

necessary for Him that you should help Him. But it 
18 



274 The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 

is necessary for yourself that you should be true. 
Nothing but a clear faith that the battles which we 
are fighting are God's battles, can make us strong 
enough for all this. 

We look up to the summit of our humanity, where 
Jesus stands, and there we see the fire of this faith 
burning in perfect light. Behold him in the Gos- 
pels. Men came to him and said, " Do this ! Do 
that ! " " Speak to my brother that he divide the 
inheritance." " Restore the kingdom to Israel," and 
how he waved them aside. " Who made me a judge 
or divider over you ?" " Put up thy sword into its 
sheath." " My hour is not yet come." 

One of the marvellous things about Jesus is the 
union of fire and patience. He saw his Father's 
House turned into a place of merchandise, and in- 
stantly the whip of small cords was in his hands 
and he was cleansing the sacred place with his im- 
passioned indignation. And yet he walked day after 
day through the streets of Jerusalem and saw the sin 
and let the sinners sin on with only the remonstrance 
of his pure presence and his pitying gaze. Base 
and blind is the man who lets himself misread that 
patience. Base and blind is he who excuses his easy 
tolerance of wickedness, his comfortable carelessness 
about the sin of the world, by quoting to himself the 
fact that Jesus did not call down the lightning out of 
heaven to destroy the wicked city of the Jews. But 
blind also is he who does not learn the true lesson 
of that divine patience, the truth which the Lord 
himself put into His parable of the tares, the truth 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 275 

that only in God's own time and God's own way can 
the battles of the Lord be fought. The general holds 
his army till the right moment for launching them 
upon the foe. It is heroism to stand still and wait 
under fire as truly as it is heroism by-and-by to rush 
upon the guns of the enemy. It is disobedience and 
weakness to be self-willed and fight wrongly, as 
truly as it is to run away and refuse to fight at all. 
There is no self-will in Jesus. He is one with His 
Father and lives by his Father's will. Every act that 
he did came forth, therefore, out of the eternal nature. 
His sword was always bathed in heaven. The devil 
said to Him, " Worship me and you shall have this 
world you want so much, and save it to your heart's 
content." "Not so," said Jesus. "It is not just to 
save the world, but to save it righteously. To save 
it unrighteously is not truly to save it at all. Get 
thee behind me, Satan ! " for a courage like this, 
growing out of a faith like his ! 

I have spoken of the battles against sin as if they 
were altogether battles with the world's sins, with 
sin outside ourselves. Let me, before I close my 
sermon, speak to you in a few words about that 
harder battle which goes on in a man's own soul, his 
battle with his own sins, and see how the truth of 
which I have been preaching applies especially to it ; 
how there most of all the sword must be bathed in 
heaven. To know first of all and deepest of all, that 
that battle which goes on within us is God's battle, 
is of supreme importance. What are our sins? 
What is your selfishness, your untruthfulness, your 



276 The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 

cruelty ? Is it something which hurts and hinders 
you ? Indeed it is. But beyond that it is something 
which usurps a kingdom which belongs to God. It 
is His enemy. And every movement of your con- 
science, ever sense of usurpation and of incongruity, 
is not merely the revolt of your own outraged soul. It 
is also the claim of the true King upon his Kingdom. 
It is the sound of the monarch's trumpet summon- 
ing the rebellious castle to surrender. Believe this, 
and what a dignity enters into the moral struggle 
of our life. It is no mere restless fermentation, the 
disturbed nature out of harmony with itself. It is 
God, with the great moral gravitation of universal 
righteousness, dragging this stray and wayward 
atom back into Himself. deep divine mysterious 
process, that goes on wherever in silent chamber or 
in crowded street the humbled penitent lies pros- 
trate in the dust, or the resolute struggler stands 
wrestling with his temptation ! 

But if the battle be God's battle, then it must be 
fought only with God's weapons. That must follow 
in our struggles with our sins as well as in our strug- 
gles with the world. You want to get rid of your 
selfishness. You must not kill it with the sword 
of another selfishness, which thenceforth shall rule in 
its place. Have we not all known men who in their 
youth were profligate and reckless ? They flung the 
gold of health, and purity, and good esteem into the 
mire of licentiousness. By-and-by they saw how 
foolish and how fatal all that was. They were kill- 
ing themselves with this which they call life. Then 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 277 

they reformed. They took care of their health. 
They nursed their reputation. They grew even to 
be very patterns of propriety. The town has no 
such censors of wickedness to-day as they are. They 
are as uncharitable as they once were unscrupulous. 
And they are just as selfish to-day, as they were 
twenty years ago when they were living in the furi- 
ous indulgence of their appetites. They have kill- 
ed one selfishness with the sword of another selfish- 
ness. It is the old story of the Book of Kings. 
Sennacharib king of Assyria is slain by his sons, as he 
is worshipping in the house of Nisroch his God. 
And Esarhaddon his son reigns in his stead. And so 
the Assyrian despotism goes on still ! 

Or think of the way in which the man who finds 
himself indifferent about truth, and wants to conquer 
his indifference, betakes himself to partisan intol- 
erance, and grows narrow and bitter on principle. 
Think of how the skeptic, by-and-by, weary of skep- 
ticism, shuts his eyes upon the light and calls his 
wilful blindness faith. The instances are numberless. 
The killing of sin by sin, of selfishness by selfishness, 
of death by death ! 

But he who dares to count the battle of his soul 
God's battle, must rise to loftier and purer methods. 
For him selfishness can only be cast out by self-for- 
getfulness and consecration ; and false liberality and 
license can only be overcome by larger and truer 
liberty; and skepticism, which is the glamor of the 
twilight, must never dream of going back into the 
darkness, but must press forward to the noonday. 



278 The Sword Bathed in Heaven. 

Here only is there any real enthusiasm and hope. 
Sometimes I know it must have seemed to some of 
you as if the prospect of life were very doleful, be- 
cause it offered nothing but the wearisome monoto- 
nous alternation and exchange of sin for sin. When 
the sins of recklessness could be no longer indulged 
in, then should come the sins of prudence; when 
the vices of youth were over, then welcome the other 
vices of old age. my dear friend, there is some- 
thing better than that. It is possible to bring 
down to the earth the perfect standards of the heav- 
ens, to stop thinking about safety and comfort and 
salvation altogether, and to be splendidly inspired 
with the consciousness that we are soldiers under 
God; to think of our own sins not as the things 
which are going to condemn us to eternal torture, 
but as the enemies of Him, the hindrances that 
stand in the way of His victorious designs ; to see 
their badness not in their consequences, but in their 
nature, not in their quantity but in their quality; 
and so to bring to bear upon the very least of them 
the intense hatred and intolerance which the very 
nature of sin must always excite in him who has 
attained a true passion for holiness. 

Can you imagine Jesus discovering in the robes 
of his spotless holiness, one single spot of sin? Be- 
hold him as he gazes on it ! Is there any question 
in him as to whether it is great or small ? The pos- 
itive horror of its being there swallows up all ques- 
tions of its size. Is there any question as to what 
its consequence will be? The present horror is 



The Sword Bathed in Heaven, 279 

enough. The future is not thought of. Only, all the 
Godhood that is in Jesus is instantly summoned to 
destroy this spot of sin. All the ocean of the divine 
power and holiness is implored to pour in and wash 
this speck of wickedness away. 

So it is possible for us to deal with every sin, little 
or great, that we discover in our hearts. To count 
it God's enemy and to fight it with all His purity and 
strength; that is what it means for us that our 
sword should be bathed in heaven ! Courage can 
only come with thoroughness. But with absolute 
thoroughness, courage must come. Resolve to-day 
that every strength of God which it is your right to 
invoke, because you are His child, and which prayer 
and consecration can bring into you from Him, shall 
be devoted to the overcoming of your sin, and then 
your sin shall certainly be overcome. May He whose 
enemy that sin is, as well as yours, grant that victory 
to von, and win it for Himself! 



SERMON XVI. 

"As the Father Jcnoweth me, even so know I the Father." 
St. John x. 15. 

" Then shall I know even as also I am known." 
1 Corinthians xhi. 12. 

THE first of these two texts is from the words of 
Jesus. He is telling the people of his relation 
to them on one side, and to his Father on the other. 
He says he is like a shepherd in the charge of sheep. 
Between him and the owner of the sheep, who has put 
him in charge of them, there is the most perfect confi- 
dence, a mutual knowledge which is absolute. The 
second text is from one of the epistles of St. Paul. 
He is anticipating the completion of life. He is 
looking forward and saying what man will be when 
he comes to his completeness. And what he proph- 
ecies is just exactly what Christ declares as already 
present in himself. Paul says, <4 some day I shall 
know God as God knows me." Jesus says, " As 
God knows me, even so do I now know God." 

Do not these two verses, taken together, give a 
very striking picture of the general method of the 



The Knowledge of God. 281 

Christian faith. ? Do they not in their combination 
make that same impression which is made by the 
whole New Testament ? Behold here in almost iden- 
tical words are the eager hope and the calm assur- 
ance of accomplishment. Here is man reaching out 
for a great spiri Glial attainment, for the knowledge of 
God; and here is The Man saying, " I have attained 
it, I do know God." That is the very spirit and 
soul of the New Testament, the hope of man already 
fulfilled in Jesus Christ, the possibility of man made 
already manifest in Jesus Christ. Among the dif- 
ferences which have been in the world since Christ's 
religion came, is not this one of the greatest, that the 
best men in all their hopes and struggles have hoped 
and struggled in the presence of a visible success ? 
( In all times, under every faith, the men of hope and 
struggle have carried in their hearts a deep assurance 
that the thing for which they strove was possi- 
ble. I Under every discouragement, untouched by any 
skepticism or contempt of scornful friend or foe, there 
has lain at the bottom of the soul a conviction too 
deep for reason to give an account of, that this which 
seemed so impossible could be done. The soul could 
break through its selfishness, could despise danger 
and pain, could enter into communion with God. 
There could be no struggle at all buoyant and enthu- 
siastic without such certain convictions lying at the 
bottom of the soul. But now what happened — one 
of the things which happened — at the incarnation 
was that this assurance, which had lain at the bottom 
of the human heart, came forth and was a living, man- 



282 The Knowledge of God. 

lfest Being. It put on human flesh. It spoke with 
human lips. It worked with human hands. Christ 
was what man had felt in his soul that he might be. 
Christ did what man's heart had always told him 
that it was in his humanity to do. The new man 
which the old manhood had always felt struggling 
within itself came forth, and men knew themselves, 
their true selves, for the first time manifest in Him. 
This was what made man's hope thenceforth another 
thing. The stars at which men had guessed, know- 
ing with what they called certainty that they were 
there, lo ! in the Incarnation they burned out visibly. 
Thenceforth it was with a new and different assur- 
ance that the believer said, " I shall some day know 
as I am known," when Christ had once said, "As 
the Father knoweth me, I do now know the Father." 
I know that there may seem to borne of you to be 
something strange in talk like this. Have you been 
in the habit of thinking of Christ as of one so far 
away, so different from us, that what he is and does 
seems to throw no light on what we may be and do ? 
But such a thought as that denies the very power of 
the Incarnation. Here stand our human lives, all 
dark and lustreless. Here stands one human life in 
which has been lighted the fire of an evident divin- 
ity. Shall we look on and see the fine lines and the 
fair colors of human nature brought out by the fire 
which burns within, and not make any glowing in- 
ference with regard to our own humanity, with regard 
to its unfulfilled possibilities and the attainments for 
which it may confidently hope ? Surely not so ! If 



The Knowledge of God. 283 

He can conquer temptation, then to be conquered by 
temptation, however it may seem inevitable to-day, 
cannot be the hopeless doom of man. If he cannot 
merely be known of God, but know God, then we 
too may be above the fear of any base agnosticism 
and look forward to the day in which we too shall 
know as we are known. 

Let us believe indeed that in the experience of 
Christ there is such revelation of the possibility, such 
confirmation of the hopes of our humanity ! So 
only does his life become that beacon on the moun- 
tain-top, that bugle cry at the army's head, which he 
evidently counted it to be, which it has so often been 
through all the Christian centuries ! 

One special illustration of all tins is in these two 
texts, which I have chosen for this morning. The 
knowledge of God, a knowledge of Him such as He 
has of us, this Christ declares that he possesses. 
This, because of Christ's possession of it, we dare to 
believe that we shall some day possess. Let us try 
to understand this belief more deeply, that we may 
make it more thoroughly our own. Let us study 
first Christ's assurance about himself, and then St. 
Paul's hope for all believers. 

" As the Father knoweth me, even so know 1 the 
Father." The words are full of that idea of mutual- 
ness which gives so much of warmth and richness to 
all life. Any relation which is all one-sided is un- 
satisfactory and dull. It is not vividly interesting. 
We love to think of any two objects, any two beings 
which have to do with one another as ministering 



284 , The Knowledge of God. 

each to each, each sending to the other something in 
answer to that which it receives. That fills the rela- 
tionship with motion, and with motion come light and 
heat. The sun and the earth, the insect and the plant, 
the nation and the citizen, the teacher and the pupil, 
the parent and the child, the sound that strikes the 
rock and the rock which gives back reverberation to 
the sound, the air which, filled with light, gives to the 
light its substance and its swiftness, in every rela- 
tionship there is this principle of reciprocity. No- 
thing alone is thoroughly alive ; all complete life sub- 
sists in the reaction of mutuality. To give is never 
perfect life; it needs the complement, the fulfil- 
ment of taking. To take is never perfect life; it 
needs the complement, the fulfilment of giving. 

Jesus declares that this is true of knowledge, of the 
knowledge of himself and God. To be known and 
to know — these two together make the fulness of 
the relation of lives to one another. 

" The Father knoweth me." Those words must 
have summed up for Jesus a large part of the mean- 
ing and power of his life. They must have brought 
back to him the time when, as a child, he had felt 
about for the deepest connection of his newly con- 
scious life, and behind every dearest connection with 
his fellow-men had become aware, that the Creator 
of the world, the Being who was behind all other 
beings, knew him. He had read the assurance of 
that knowledge in all the sacred history of his peo- 
ple. Then he had found the confirmation and wit- 
ness of it in liia own soul. And, once completely 



The Knowledge of God. 285 

grasped and understood, it had become the inspira- 
tion and the strength of everything he was and did. 

I am not speaking now of that which was unique 
and singular in Jesus. I am not thinking of the 
peculiar and separate relation in which he stood to 
his Father. I am thinking only of that which he 
shared with all mankind. Simply as man, he felt 
the knowledge of God reaching out and laying hold 
of him. He felt his being bosomed on the divine 
intelligence. " Thine eye did see my substance yet 
being imperfect, and in thy book were allmy members 
written." So David had sung, and as we listen to his 
song we feel how in that knowledge which God has 
of him, he is finding, as it were, his naturalization 
into the universe. He is becoming able to count him- 
self no stray and foreign particle. What God knows 
has its place, its right, within the universe of God. 
It feels that knowledge of God seizing it and holding 
it as the new planet flung into the system feels gra- 
vitation seizing it and holding it in its great, warm, 
tender, mighty hand. All this was real to David. 
How much more real it must have been to Jesus ! 

It would be easy, if we had time, to point out 
what this sense of being known of the Father brought 
to Jesus. It brought independence. Ont of the 
questionings and cavillings, and hootings, and re- 
vilings of the crowd he retired into the heart of it, 
and was strong. 1 see him enveloped in it, as in a 
cloud of safety, invisible but real, while he stood in 
the tempest of reproach and objection in the temple. 
" My Father knoweth me." I see him wrap it 



286 The Knowledge of God. 

around him like a cloak as he faces Pilate upon 
Gabbatha. It brought him unity. That comprehen- 
sive certainty of being known involved the cradle, 
and the cross, and all that lay between, and made 
one single total life out of it all. It gave him 
charity. God's knowledge of him interpreted to him 
God's knowledge of his brethren, and let him freely 
leave them to the same great knowledge. We 
enumerate what it gave to him. We tell these 
blessings of it one by one. But, after all, we know 
that it was more to him than our enumeration can 
describe. It was the element in which he lived. 
It was the air he breathed. It was his life. 

And now what shall we say about the other side ? 
Was there no response to this knowledge ? Was it 
only that the Father knew the Son ? Did not the 
Son also know the Father? There is such/a one- 
sided knowledge, a knowledge in which one is only 
known, and the other only knows. The wise man 
knows this globe on which we live. He knows the 
rock andriver; he knows the animal and plant; but 
animal and plant, river and rock do not know him. 
His live intelligence beats on the surface of an abso- 
lutely passive, unconscious, unresponsive world. It 
gets no answer back. But it is altogether different 
with this consciousness of Jesus. " The Father 
knoweth me, and I know the Father," he declares. 
The very knowing that he was known by God, of 
which I have just now been speaking, was in itself a 
knowledge of God by him. That independence and 
unity and charity which came into his life with the 



The Knowledge of God. 287 

certainty that he was held in the intelligence of God, 
they were themselves an answer to the recognized 
fact of the divine intelligence. But even more 
directly there was a perception of what God was. 
There was a recognition by the sympathy of a kin- 
dred nature of the essential character of the nature 
into which it found itself pressed. What shall we 
say? Was it not like the answer which the plant 
makes to the sunshine that is poured upon it ? The 
sunshine knows the plant in radiance, and the plant 
knows the sunshine in grateful bloom. 

Jesus was no agnostic. No dreary conviction 
that there might be a God, but that if there were, he 
were hopelessly hidden from mankind, unknowable 
forever — no such dreary negative conviction was 
possible for him. He knew the Father by the direct 
perception of a kindred life. Not perfectly ! He 
himself is careful to tell us of the limitation of his 
knowledge. The prison of his incarnation, of his 
abiding in mortality enfolded him. But he knew 
God. He sent back adoration, trust, exuberant love 
in answer to the recognized care which was always 
pouring itself upon him. Now and then, in the 
calm, cool night between the hot and weary days, 
when he went apart upon the silent mountain-top 
and prayed, he went to the God whom he knew, that 
he might know him more clearly. But the knowl- 
edge was a continual fact. He knew the Father, as 
nature knows nature, by direct perception. 

Surely it must forever stand as a most impressive 
and significant fact, a fact that no man who is try- 



288 The Knowledge of God. 

ing to estimate the worth and strength of spiritual 
things can leave out of his account, that the noblest 
and most perfect spiritual being whom this world 
has ever seen, the being whom the world with most 
amazing unanimity owns for its spiritual pattern and 
leader, was sure of God. I cannot get rid of the im- 
mense, the literally unmeasurable meaning and val- 
ue of that fact. It comes to me when God is clear- 
est to me, bringing me new and yet more glorious 
assurance. It comes to me when doubt is with me, 
and I know my doubt is a mistake, and I sit even in 
the midst of doubt, joyously waiting for certainty ; 
as the watcher for sunrise sits joyously expecting 
the time when the radiance which is already shining 
on the summits of the hills shall pour down into his 
valley where it still is dark. It comes to me in sor- 
row and in joy, in hope and fear, in ignorance and 
wisdom, in work and rest, the great fact, radiant with 
significance, that Jesus was sure of and believed in 
and knew God. 

Nor must we let our thoughts rest solely on this large 
knowledge of nature by nature, which is the broadest 
statement of the truth. The knowledge which the 
Father had of the Son, and the answering knowledge 
which the Son had of the Father, referred also to the 
details of action as well as to the elemental facts of 
existence. "The Father knoweth me; 1 ' surely when 
Jesus says that, it means more than just that God 
was aware of his existence. That word " know " on 
the lips of Jesus is always a deep and pregnant 
word. To know any man is not merely to be sure 



The Knowledge of God. 289 

of his existence, but to have some conception of what 
his existence signifies, and what it is for. For God 
to know Jesus was for God to have in his soul some 
purpose and will about the life of Jesus. The Jesus 
whom God knew was not a mere name, not even a 
mere nature. It was Jesus the Saviour of mankind, 
Jesus the Teacher, the Reveal er of Divinity, the Pat- 
tern of Righteousness, the Victim of the Cross ! 

Is not this truly a great step forward ? It was 
much for Christ that he was never for a moment un- 
aware of God's existence. It was much that every 
instant he felt God's being under his being, as the 
ship feels the ocean under its great sides; but when 
we add to this the definite and clear conviction that 
God had a purpose with regard to every deed 
which filled those gracious days, how much is add- 
ed ! Now it is not merely a flood of light poured 
over the whole life, but it is this same light taken 
up and broken into countless points of brilliance; the 
whole experience tremulous and palpitating at every 
promontory with the consciousness of immediate 
communication of divinity. The miracle, the ser- 
mon, the word of sympathy, the pang of suffering — 
it was not merely because the Son saw that it was 
good and right; it was because the Father wanted 
it, and willed it, that it came. Here is transfigura- 
tion. Here is glory. What sense of drudgery, 
what monotonousness or weariness could there be in a 
life like that ? It was no longer simply a great glassy 
ocean flooded with the sun. Every wave of the 

ocean had caught its own little sun, and the whole 
19 



290 The Knowledge of God. 

was full of infinitely varied yet identical life and 
light. 

And now to this detailed knowledge of God, which 
means purpose and will, to this also comes its own 
response. "The Father knoweth me." That means, 
" God has a will for every act of mine." What then 
can "I know the Father," mean, except, "In every 
act of mine, I do the Father's will." Obedience be- 
comes the organ and utterance, nay becomes the 
substance and reality of knowledge on the side of 
him who is aware that in this more special sense 
God knows him. I think of Jesus on that day when 
he called Lazarus back from the dead to life. He 
travels all the way from Galilee to Bethany. At last 
he stands beside the tomb. His soul is full of sym- 
pathy. He sees the tears and feels the misery of his 
poor friends. The dreadfulness of death oppresses 
him. Then he becomes aware of a will of God. God 
knows all that is going on there, the whole sad sor- 
row, the bereavement, the horror. And God cannot 
know anything in pure passivity. He always w T ants 
something to be done about the thing he knows. 
Every knowledge of God involves and issues in a 
will. God's will then shines on Jesus: and then be- 
hold ! He lifts his head. His face shines like the 
sun ! The gloom is gone ! He stretches out his 
hand ! He opens his lips with the cry of life ! 
"Lazarus, come forth!" "And he that was dead 
came forth, bound hand and foot with grave- 
clothes ! " 

God's will and Christ's obedience! Here then 



The Knowledge of God. 291 

there is the perfect mutualness, the absolute under- 
standing and harmony of the Father and the Son. 
If it were not the morning of the miracle at Bethany, 
hut the awful morning of the cross, it would be still 
the same. " Father, into thy hands I commend my 
spirit." There, in those words of completed obedi- 
ence, the mutual knowledge of Father and Son is 
perfect, and being blends with being; the vail and 
barrier of the human flesh no longer hangs between. 
And so as it concerns this first division of our sub- 
ject, have we not reached a picture of existence which 
may well enchain us with its richness and beauty. 
Father and Son have come close to one another. In 
mutual knowledge, in harmony of will and obedience 
they are absolutely one. Of no act that the strong 
gentle hands do, can we say anything but this, that 
Father and Son together do it, making one power, 
working one result. Who is it that calms the sud- 
den tempest on the lake ? It is the Father and 
the Son. It is God in Christ. It is Christ filled with 
God ! Who is it that speaks the parable of the prod- 
igal son, instinct with divine authority and wis- 
dom, tremulous with human tenderness and sympa- 
thy? Is it not the divine Father and the human Son, 
making one power, that utter together those wonder- 
ful words which have moved almost like a great per- 
sonal presence down through the restless or the 
sluggish generations of mankind? "My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work." It is not two con- 
federates taking hold of hands. It is one system of 
power, in which two elements perfectly blend; which 



292 The Knowledge of God. 

is a fragment and not a whole if either of the two 
be lost; which beats with one life-blood, knows but 
one standard, and issues at last embodied and ex- 
pressed in one perfect unit of result. That simplicity 
and richness, wedded to each other, we try to take 
into our understandings when we hear Jesus say, 
"As the Father knoweth me even so know I the 
Father." 

And then comes St. Paul. Years have passed 
away. The life and work of Christ have become the 
pattern and inspiration of the world. A higher and 
more spiritual standard of life has been set up. St. 
Paul is always stating it. He states it in that pas- 
sage of his Epistle to the Corinthians which is the 
second of oar texts. Let me give what little time 
remains to a few thoughts upon that passage. 

" Then shall I know even as also I am known," says 
Paul. I have already bidden you observe how 
exactly Paul's hope is identical with Christ's con- 
sciousness. A knowledge of God answering to God's 
knowledge of him, that is what St. Paul expects. 
And the correspondence between Paul and Jesus is 
complete. It includes both of the two" kinds of 
knowledge which, in speaking of Jesus, I have been 
trying to define. 

First, it includes the larger knowledge of nature 
by nature. " God knows me," says St. Paul. " He 
knows me as the Maker knows His work, lie knows 
me as the Father knows the child." That was the 
fundamental conviction of the great apostle. lie 



The Knowledge of God. 293 

went about his daily work enfolded by that convic- 
tion. " In Him we live and move and have our be- 
ing," he cried to the Athenians. But that convic- 
tion for him inevitably involved another. If the 
Father knew the child, then it must be in the child's 
power to know the Father. Ignorance he could un- 
derstand. Hindrance, darkness, perversion and mis- 
take, he saw them everywhere. But the power to 
know God he knew was in man. Some time certain- 
ly it must come forth and be powerful. God might 
be unknown to many men, Athenians and others, 
but God was not unknowable by man, not unknow- 
able by any man that lived. 

St. Paul, like Christ, was no agnostic. In these days, 
when a whole school of philosophy takes upon itself 
not merely to disparage the poor flickering knowl- 
edge of God which man has yet attained, but to draw 
a sharp line, to build a high wall, beyond which the 
knowledge of man can never go, it is good to resort 
to the assured confidence of this great soul. To 
dwell upon how much is unknown may be often very 
good for us. To declare anything of God to be intrin- 
sically and eternally unknowable by man, is unreason- 
able. May we not even say that it is insolent, insult- 
ing both to God and man. Here we may say, as St. 
Paul essentially says, as we seemed to hear Jesus say 
when we were listening to his words, that to know 
that God knows us is itself a knowledge of God, and 
promises what depth of future knowledge no man 
can begin to say. 

Let us keep this distinction always in our minds, 



294 The Knowledge of God. 

and so be always full of hope. The unknown is not 
by any necessity the unknowable. Now there is 
mercy holding me, of which I hardly know more 
than that it is there, and that it is merciful. There 
is wisdom guiding me of whose existence I am cer- 
tainly aware, but whose ways I cannot comprehend. 
But it shall not be always so. Now I am known per- 
fectly, but I know in part, in the very least and weak- 
est and dimmest way. But the time shall come when 
I shall know as I am known. Let me be sure of that, 
and with what hope I live. Nay, it is more than hope. 
For to be sure that such a knowledge shall be mine 
some day, is in a true sense to know now. Such a 
hope for the future is a possession in the present. 

The other mutualness of knowledge we saw was 
that which lay between a special will or purpose of 
God and the corresponding activity of man. That 
was complete in Jesus. To the completeness of 
that too we may look forward in ourselves. " He 
spake and it was done,'' says David. That is a dec- 
laration of the oneness of God with His creation. 
His will is instantly echoed in its being and its ac- 
tion. The answer is so instantaneous and sure that 
the oneness between His will and His world is per- 
fect ; so perfect that often men's eyes have not been 
able to distinguish one from the other, and have said 
the world was God. Is not that a magnificent pic- 
ture of the oneness which we would have between 
God's will and our action ? No force of nature ever 
fails in its response. The seasons in their coming 
and their going, the sun in its rising and its setting, 



The Knowledge of God. 295 

the tempests and lightnings, fire and hail, snow and 
vapors, wind and storm fulfilling his word, all of 
these are absolute; they never vary; the glory of 
science is in finding out how invariable they are. 
They are of lower order. They are of easier submis- 
sion. Their obedience then is just a type and pic- 
ture, just an image and a prophecy, of what shall 
come to pass when iu our higher world, our world 
of free thought and free action, we too shall become 
as obedient to God as are wind, fire, lightning and 
sunshine in their lower world. 

( Oh how one longs for it sometimes ! With per- 
fect freedom, not turned into machines, still keep- 
ing all the glory of our liberty, to answer perfectly 
to every will of God with absolute obedience. To 
do the right because it is His will, and to do His will 
because it is right always. We know that there 
alone is peace and power. Such a standard cuts 
right across our ordinary standards. The feeblest 
life, perfectly harmonized thus with God's, outshines 
the mightiest life in which that harmony fails. 

Is it not evident that the great hope which St. 
Paul holds up before us all, and which our hearts rec- 
ognize and claim, must include this or it is not suffi- 
cient. Simply to know God, though the knowledge 
were complete, simply to know God if it were possi- 
ble without obedience, would be a barren privilege. 
O how we separate our knowing and our obeying 
powers, our mental and our moral natures, as if they 
could be separated, as if either of them could live 
without the other ! No, the promise that we shall 



296 The Knowledge of God. 

know includes the promise that we shall obey ! So 
it attains its fullest richness. 

When we say that, eternity springs into life and 
lives. No longer a bare doctrine, no longer a great 
arid fact, that we shall live forever, but a great, actual 
reality ! Hark, through the atmosphere of that be- 
lief can you not hear the music of the activity which 
fills the streets of the New Jerusalem ? I hear the feet 
hurrying over the glassy pavements, the voices calling 
to each other in the joy of service, the ringing of the 
hammers on the anvils where in the fire of the love 
of God eht perfect obedience of His redeemed is 
forging his perfect will into the instruments of per- 
fect deeds. 

Have I wasted your Sunday morning with abstract 
truths, and far-away visions of the future? Jt would 
be waste indeed if abstract truth must not always lie 
at the heart of concrete action, and if the visions of 
the future, thoroughly believed, were not the realities 
of the present. What Christ was we shall be some day, 
and because we shall be it some day, we may begin to 
be it now. What is the meaning and result of all that 
I have said to you this morning ? O my friends, it is 
this ! You need not live alone, for you may, if you 
will, know and obey God. You and God, you and 
God, one system of pow r er knit together in mutual 
knowledge, and in common standards ! That is what 
Christ claimed you for. Give yourself to Him, and 
you shall come to that. Behold Him ! Hear Him ! 
Come by Him to the Father, and then live ! O Christ, 
draw us, thy Father's children, to our Father now ! 



SERMON XVI L 

^n (grit spirit ttm tfttf f&arfl* 

11 The spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit 
from the Lord troubled him." — 1 Samuel xvi. 14. 

WE probably should be surprised if we under- 
stood how very little people really know 
about the Bible and what is in it. We deceive our- 
selves regarding; our own knowledge. The sacred 
Book has lain so long upon our tables, and we are so 
familiar with its outside look, that we get a vague 
idea that we have read it. But if we really brought 
ourselves to the point we should be amazed at our 
own inability to tell even the simplest of its stories 
rightly. And we imagine sometimes that all the 
rest of the world know more about the Book than 
we do ; but every now and then something gives us 
a glimpse of what they do know, and we are startled 
at the imperfectness and carelessness of their know- 
ledge of the richest and most familiar and most 
important Book in all the world. There are many 
of you who are eager for each new book, who are 
anxious if each Saturday night does not find you 

read up to the lino of the week's new literature, 

297 



298 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

who probably never read the graphic, brilliant, 
stirring story of Saul, the first King of Israel, in 
all your lives. We circulate the Bible by the 
million. Some parts of it we read as a religious 
duty. But there are whole books of it teeming with 
interest which few of us ever touch. One sometimes 
feels that some day or other a great increase of 
the spiritual power of the Bible will come with what 
will be almost a re-discovery of its literary attract- 
iveness. When people break through the strange 
feeling which has gathered around it that it is dull 
and unreal, and find that it is the most interesting 
book in all the world, then they will be open for its 
deeper power to lay hold upon their consciences and 
hearts. 

Saul's life, as it is told to us in the first Book of 
Samuel, is the perfection of a tragedy. If it were 
not the story of a real man who lived in the Jewish 
tribe of Benjamin, it might be the most sublime alle- 
gory that ever was written of human life in the 
tragical aspect of it, which is always suggesting it- 
self, and sometimes presses itself upon us so urgently 
that we can see no other. There is one chapter, the 
tenth chapter of the first Book of Samuel, which is 
as fresh as a spring morning. A farmer's boy, light- 
hearted, innocent and strong, striding away over the 
hills to find a flock of asses that had wandered from 
his father's fields. He talks with his servant; he 
questions the group of girls whom he meets at a 
town gate. At last he meets a venerable prophet, 
who tells him what fills his young frank eyes with 



An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 299 

wonder, and makes his heart leap with the myste- 
rious birth of noble ambitions — that he is to be 
the first King of the new Kingdom of Israel. It is 
all as fresh and bright as innocence and hope can 
make it. Then there is another chapter, the twenty- 
eighth of the same Book, which is like the bleakest, 
bitterest day when the year is dying in December. 
The same Saul grown old and wretched, with his 
country all in confusion, with his conscience tortured 
by memories, the subject of insane fits of melancholy 
and frenzy, encamped now with his army on a cold 
hillside, with the Philistines camped opposite to him, 
and knowing that he must fight them in the morn- 
ing, and that they are too strong for him. This Saul 
at midnight creeps stealthily across the mountain 
to find a witch, who brings up before him an appari- 
tion of Samuel the prophet, the same who had first 
told him that he should be king; who tells him now 
out of his ghostly lips that God has become his ene- 
my, and will rend his kingdom out of his hands. 
All is as dark and bitter as guilt and despair can 
make it. Jealousy, superstition, frenzy, pride, have 
closed down together on this ruined man. And what 
is the misery of this half-savage life, we say, but just, 
in strong bold colors the picture of what our 
smoothed and civilized lives are ? It is the same 
thing, only more vivid. The same "tragedy of the 
changing life is everywhere. Everywhere are bright 
enthusiastic boyhoods turning into the guilty and 
desperate old age of weary Sauls. 

The verse which I have taken for our text this 



300 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

morning contains one statement about this tragical 
history of King Saul, which well deserves our study. 
It is one of those epitomes of a life which open the 
deepest questions. It is said that " the spirit of 
the Lord departed from him, and an evil spirit from 
the Lord troubled him." We catch at once the char- 
acter of the representation. It is entirely realistic. 
There is a vivid picture in it all. God is seen by him 
who writes it, standing surrounded by spirits who 
are in His control, to be sent wherever He shall 
please. Some of them are good and are his spirits 
pre-eminently; others of them are evil, the spirits that 
vex and torture and distress the men to whom they 
come. God sends these spirits as he pleases. He 
speaks to a spirit of blessing and the spirit flies to 
make some saint better and happier. He turns to a 
spirit of evil, and he hurries to do his dreadful work 
of punishment on some poor sinner. God's spirit of 
good has been with Saul, but at one point, one crisis 
in his life that spirit departed from him, and an evil 
spirit from the Lord troubled him. 

That picture of the court of God with its company 
of various spirits has grown dim. No such clear and 
objective picture stands before us. But the truth 
still remains, which that picture tried to express, the 
truth that the evil spirit, like the good spirit, came 
out of God's presence; that when the life of Saul had 
altered, and the blessing of his early innocence had 
left him, it was not as if he had been cast out into a 
region over which God has no control, not as if God 
had nothing to do with him any longer. As the old 



An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 301 

blessing had come out of his relationship to God, so 
the new curse came out of that same relationship. 
As it was God who made his first life noble and 
happy, so it was God who made his last life desperate 
and wretched. He could not get outside of God. 
Whatever spirit, good or evil, came to him, came to 
him from the Lord. 

This is a strange, perhaps at first it sounds as if it 
were a dreadful, truth. But we shall understand it 
better if we look and see what were the circum- 
stances of the change when the evil spirit supplanted 
the good in the King's life. There were two acts in 
Saul's life, occurring near together, which seemed to 
mark the point of change. One was the unwarran- 
ted performance of a religious rite. The people were 
in a sad strait. They had been crowded and driven 
by the Philistines. Saul was waiting, as he had 
been bidden, for Samuel to come and offer the sac- 
rifice which was to call down God's blessing on the 
host as they met their terrible enemy. When Samuel 
did not come, Saul grew impatient; and by-and-by, 
neglecting every command, casting every scruple to 
the winds, he offered the burn t-oife ring himself. 
Not long after came the second action. Saul had 
gone against the Amalekites. Samuel, speaking for 
the Lord, had bidden him to conquer them and to 
destroy them. The King did conquer them, but for 
the ostentatious glory of his own triumph and for a 
splendid sacrifice to God, he spared the life of their 
King Agag and the choicest of their sheep and oxen. 
These were the two. It does not seem that the mad- 



302 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

ness and misery were sent in direct punishment for 
these two actions, but these actions mark the time 
when the King's life begins to change. The clouds 
begin to gather. God seems to be against him. The 
winds that used to help him on, blow now in his 
face, and all grows harder and darker till the bitter 
end. They seem only trifling actions, but they both 
mean the same thing. They mean rebellion. Self- 
will is the essence of them both. They mean that 
he who had been frankly obedient, only asking to 
know the will of God that he might do it, now 
chooses to do his own will. That is the point where 
the change comes. From the time when he begins 
to disobey God, God works against him, and the 
prophet of God, who in the first scene was blessing 
him and telling him of his great mission, in the last 
scene appears, rising like a ghost to rebuke him and 
tell him of his doom ; as the hopes and chances of 
a man's early youth rise ghostlike before him, when 
he has grown old, to reproach him with the failure 
of his life. 

Now I think we shall understand this story best 
if we consider how wide the law of life is that it 
opens to us. The law is that a beneficent power, if 
we obey it, blesses and helps us; but the same power, 
if we disobey it, curses and ruins us. That law runs 
everywhere. See how most manifestly it is true in 
nature. There was a time when the ignorance of 
man divided all natural forces into two hostile camps. 
One army was fighting against man. The other 
army was fighting for his good. The sunshine was 



An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 303 

his friend, the cruel lightning was his enemy. But 
what have we learnt since, as science has brought us 
more into the soul of nature ? Is it not this, that 
there is no force which is deliberately set to do man 
harm ; that the mosthostile force, if we can understand 
and obey it, treat it after its laws and nature, becomes 
our friend and ally? The cruel lightning carries our 
tenderest messages like a pitying slave. Everywhere, 
man says that he rules nature and she does his work. 
The truth is that she does none of his work except as 
he obeys her, docilely studies her ways, and suits him- 
self to them. You obey fire, and she will forge your 
iron and cook your dinner. You disobey fire, and 
she will sweep your city in a night off the face of 
the earth. This is the meaning of applied science: 
man humbly learning nature and by obedience turn- 
ing her from his enemy into his friend. 

The same is true of government and law. Here 
are you sitting to-day peacefully in your house, with- 
out a fear, and yonder in the jail is some poor wretch 
for whom there is no escape until the dreadful day 
when he shall be led out to his dreadful death upon 
the scaffold. The same government, the same law 
makes your safety and his danger. The same bene- 
ficent power protects your life and takes his life away. 
The change came with his disobedience. There is 
something picturesque and awful in the instant 
change which a sudden crime makes in the whole re- 
lation Avhich a man holds to the state he lives in. He 
has grown up protected by his nation's law. It cared 
for him even before his birth, and there has never 



304 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

been a moment in his boyhood, youth or manhood, 
when its shield has not been over him and its sword 
drawn to strike down any one who dared to do him 
harm. Some day he does a sudden crime, he diso- 
beys the law, he takes a brother's life, and instantly, 
as his dagger pierces and the life-blood flows, every- 
thing alters. The law which has protected him be- 
comes his enemy. Her sword is pointed at his 
heart. Her shield is spread before him, only lest 
any one should snatch him from her certain punish- 
ment. Instead of trusting in her quiet smile he 
quails under her pitiless eye. She is transformed 
the moment that he disobeys. 

The same is true about a man's relation to the art 
he practices. Find out and thoroughly obey its 
fundamental principles and all the genius of yonr 
art is with you. Its history and tradition are the 
solid backing of your life. Every man who ever 
worked in it, or who is working in it to-day, is your 
ally. But disobey its principles, be wilful, try to ex- 
cel or shine, not by conformity to its nature but by 
some fantastic violation of it, and all your art con- 
tends against you and balks you at every step. 

One illustration more. All this is true about our 
friends. We obey our nobler friends and their 
friendship helps us. We disobey them, and their 
friendship harms us. Obedience seems a hard 
word to use of friendship, and yet there must be 
obedience, there must be docile conformity, a shap- 
ing of your life upon that higher life, a reaching 
up, a stretching out of what you are, to try to match 



An Evil Spirit from the Lord, 305 

what he is. If there is that, then how his nature 
ministers to yours ; how first as standard, then as im- 
pulse, and continually as elevation and as joy he 
gives himself to you. These are the commonplaces of 
every ennobling friendship. But if there is no obe- 
dience ; if, bound to his higher life by obligation or by 
that mere liking which may have no relation to your 
character, you insist on living your own life, what 
then is the result ? How he rebukes you every day. 
How every deed he does exasperates you. How, by- 
and-by you hate the goodness which you will not 
imitate and which builds up a wall between you and 
your friend, whom you would like to have a man just 
like yourself. Was not Judas cursed by the same 
friendship with Jesus that perfected John ? And if 
we try to picture to ourself the life of a man living 
in constant association with the noblest people, yet 
absolutely wilful and refusing to conform to any of 
the higher laws of life which they are always set- 
ting before him, we shall surely see him in our ima- 
gination growing more and more reckless and defi- 
ant. Yes, men are ruined by their best and dearest 
friends — not simply by wanton indulgence and fool- 
ish fondness, but by the noble example that is never 
followed and the noble invitation never answered. 

These are the illustrations of our Law. They show 
the . absolute necessity of obedience everywhere. 
Obedience is the only key that can unlock the treas- 
ures of nature or of man. Obedience has an abso- 
lute power. To the obedient man nothing can re- 
fuse its richness. Nature flies open and takes man 
20 



306 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

into her inmost heart. Government opens her arms 
and surrounds him with her most secure protection. 
The best men make their goodness as much his as 
theirs. But if obedience is not there, nothing can 
take its place; no mere excitement of the taste, no 
rapturous affection can cover over and change the 
fact of wilfulness. This was so strongly stated by 
Samuel in his rebuke to Saul. Saul said that he had 
disobeyed God because he honored Him and wanted 
to do Him supreme reverence. He had saved the 
sheep and oxen when Jehovah had bade him destroy, 
in order to sacrifice to Jehovah. " And Samuel said, 
Hath the Lord as great delight in burnt-offerings and 
sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord ? Be- 
hold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken 
than the fat of rams." They are great words. They 
are words full of the strength of life. If you would 
be strong you must learn to obey. - Self-will is weak- 
ness; but to find the nature and will of everything 
that is higher than you are, and bend yourself to it 
with complete docility, that makes the richest treas- 
ure it possesses, yours. learn to obey, learn to 
obey ! (Obedience is the only mastery and strength. 
And now let us return to the description which is 
given of the disastrous change in the life of Saul. 
" The Spirit of the Lord departed from him, and an 
evil spirit from the Lord troubled him." This phrase, 
"an evil spirit from the Lord," is used again and again 
to account for the disturbed and wretched life which 
the unhappy monarch now began to live. What 
does it mean but just this truth, which we have been 



An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 307 

studying, brought up and found to be also true in its 

application to God. ( The truth is that every benefi- *^ 

cent power which helps us so long as we obey it, 

turns by its own nature and harms and hinders us 

... 1/ 

so soon as we are disobedient. Is this then true of 

God? If God is the most beneficent of all powers, 
the central goodness of the universe, it cannot but 
be true of Him. " I form the light and create dark- 
ness," says Jehovah in Isaiah. " I make peace and 
create evil." "They rebelled and vexed his Holy 
Spirit, therefore He was turned to be their enemy, 
and He fought against them." So it is said about 
God and his people. It is an idea which runs through 
all the Bible. In many forms it is continually reap- 
pearing. It must be so, for God in the Bible is uni 
versal. He fills all things. No creature of his can 
creep away out of his sight, and live in a realm with 
which Pie has nothing to do. And God in the Bible 
is positive. No life can lie here close to his life, and 
not be affected in some way by that power of right- 
eousness. He must be something to us; what he 
shall be to us depends on what we are to him. Saul 
is obedient, and God is brightness, courage, hope, 
happiness. Saul disobeys, and his soul becomes 
melancholy, gloomy, irritable, suspicious, envious, 
distracted. Did the God who made the light have 
anything to do with the making of this darkness 
afterwards ? How shall he think of Saul in his 
desperate old age ? Is that mountain over which he 
climbs in the dark to find the witch of Endor in her 
cave, somewhere quite outside the world where God 



308 An Evil Spirit from the Lord, 

is everything — outside the world in which lay the 
sunny valleys of Benjamin, along which the young 
Saul had passed seeking his father's asses? No, it is 
the same world; a world capable of holding such di- 
verse scenes because it is all under the same God. 
Where it opens itself to Him it is He that makes its sun- 
shine. Where it hides itself from Him it is no less He 
that makes its shadow. Without the sun there could 
be no more the depth of the shadow than the bright- 
ness of the light; and if there had been no God, the 
bitterness of Saul's old age would have been as im- 
possible as the beautiful happiness of his boyhood. 

It bewilders us to think how far-reaching this 
truth is. So long as God is in the universe, every 
soul that is in the universe must feel His power. No 
space can be so wide, no time so long as to exhaust 
His influence. He that obeys, must feel the ever- 
present God in joy. He that disobeys must feel 
Him in pain everywhere and forever. These are 
the terrible necessities of obedience and disobedience. 
W"e may state it; the Bible often does state it judi- 
cially. We may speak of God's vengeance. It may 
seem to be the angry revenge of one who has been 
insulted and ignored. We may picture to ourselves 
His wrath. With realistic fancy we may imagine to 
ourselves the flames of His anger consuming the 
rebellious souls, which yet are so like him who pun- 
ishes them that they can never die. Such pictures 
have their power, as the crudest, coarsest representa- 
tives of the essential truth that to the disobedient God 
must come in suffering, as He comes to the obedient 



An Evil Spirit from the Lord, 309 

in joy. / The essential truth of heaven and hell is in- 
eradicable in the universe. ', But greater and truer than 
any picture of angry vengeance, more solemn, more 
sublime, more impressive to the fear of a reasonable 
and thoughtful man, there is the mighty image of God 
standing in the centre of all things. And all things 
have to touch Him. And as all things touch Him, ac- 
cording to their characters, he becomes to them bless- 
ing or curse. He is the happiness of obedience, and 
the misery of disobedience throughout his world. He 
looks with sympathetic joy or with profoundest pity 
on the souls He judges, but the judgments both come 
from Him. The right hand and the left hand, are 
both His. Burning there like the sun of all the 
world, He must be a comforting and guiding light, or 
a consuming fire — one or the other — to every soul. 

Is this all theory ? At the best is it all a revelation 
of something of which otherwise we could have had 
no knowledge ? Or is there anything in our expe- 
rience that testifies to such a double power belonging 
necessarily to the very existence of a God? If in 
our lives there has been any difference between 
those days in which we tried and those in which we 
did not try to do God's will ; any such difference as 
made us feel on the first set of days thankful and 
glad, and on the other class of days wretched and 
almost indignant that there was a God in heaven; 
then we do know this truth of Saul's life in our 
own life. You do wrong. You have chosen to 
do wrong. You are sitting here with your bad 
choice enshrined in vour heart. You did it vester- 



310 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

day. You mean to do it again to-morrow. You are 
deliberately and wilfully disobedient. Tell me, is it 
the same to you that in the heavens, and pervading all 
the earth, there is a power of righteousness, a great 
pure, dear Being, whose child you are, who loves 
you, who has a right to your obedience, whom you 
are disobeying — is it all the same to you as if 
there were no God, as if that choice of yours were 
a mere whim of your own fancy, made in the 
face of no eternal righteousness and against the 
protest of no pleading love ? Would it be then as 
dogged, as obstinate, as bitter, as poisonous a thing 
in all your life as it is now ? Ah, a man has to hug 
his sin very tight that the almost despotic love of 
God may not wrest it from him. He has to hide its 
venom very deep in his blood, that the great physi- 
cian may not find it out and kill it. And just so far 
as you are worse to-day for living under the grace 
of a God who has been trying all these years to make 
you better, just so far as the truth that you have 
heard has made you more callous, and the duties you 
have had put before you have made you more faith- 
less, just so far as you have not merely lost the fresh- 
ness of your youth but have grown hard and bitter 
from living in a world that teemed forever with the 
invitations to truth and charity, just so far that has 
come to you which, came to King Saul. Not merely 
"the spirit of the Lord has departed from you," but 
" an evil spirit from the Lord has troubled you." 

Here is the fatal power of disobedience, of self- 
wiil. It makes God our enemy and turns His power 



A n Evil Spirit from the Lord. 311 

against us. Not that the worst sin you or I can do 
will make him cease to love us. Ah, that cannot be ! 
And that is the tragicalness of it all ; the certainty 
that he loves us still, even while he "is turned to 
be our enemy." Do you see Jesus sitting on the 
Mount of Olives, looking down upon Jerusalem? 
Does he love that fair and rebellious city ? We do 
not begin to know how He loved her. We must be 
the God he was, and the man he was or we cannot 
begin to know. Can he save her ? If he could, he 
surely would not be sitting here ! But, such is the 
mystery of moral nature and of responsibility, it is 
himself he cannot save her from. And what is the 
essence of her curse ? Why is this city on the Syrian 
Hills doomed to a fall of which no other city in the 
world is capable ? Because of his feet that have trod 
her pavement, and his words that have sounded in 
her ears. " Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! " u If I had not 
come and spoken unto them they had not had sin." 
Here is the fatal power of disobedience. Without 
quenching the unquenchable love, it turns the divine 
nature against us, in the same overwhelmingness, by 
the same necessity with which, if we were only 
obedient, that nature would help us and bring us to 
perfection. 

In this truth of ours lies certainly one key to a 
question which theologians have very much debated. 
Wherein lay the power of the life and death of Jesus ? 
What was the atonement he accomplished ? Did the 
change which he wrought come in God or man? 
But we have seen how man's disobedience inevitably 



312 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

made a change in God — not to destroy His love, but 
to set His loving nature into hostility to the soul 
that would not do his will. And if the life and death 
of Jesus breaks down in penitence, as we know it 
does, the self-will of man, and make him once more 
gratefully, loyally obedient, what then ? The 
change in God must follow. Not the restoral of a 
Jove that was withheld, but the free utterance for help 
and culture of a love that has been never held back, 
but which has, by the man's false position, been com- 
pelled to work against him. The wind is blowing 
all the time. The man is walking dead against it, 
and it buffets him and is his enemy. You turn the 
man round and set him walking with the wind. 
The wind blows on just as before. But now it is the 
man's friend. The wind has not changed, and yet, 
with the man's change, how completely the wind 
has changed for him. 

How clear this makes the great question of every 
man's life. Is God with you or against you, my 
friend ? Is the power which comes out from Him 
to you a power of help or harm ? It must be one or 
the other. Over a broad open plain there bloAvs a 
strong steady wind. It never stops, it never chan- 
ges. All over the plain there are men and women 
on their journeys. Hear them cry out. " This wind, 
this dreadful wind ! " cries one, all out of breath and 
gasping. " How bitter it is, how cruel, how it 
hates me!" "This wind, this blessed wind ! " cries 
another, within hail of him. " How kind it is, how 
helpful, how it loves me ! " Are there two winds, or 



A n Evil Spirit from the Lord. 313 

has the one fickle wind its favorites ? No, the one 
constant wind is blowing' steadily and is no respecter 
of persons; but one man has set his face against it 
and the other man is walking with it. That is the 
reason why it seems to hate the one and love the 
other. 

Through this great open world moves God like a 
strong wind or spirit, finding out all the public and 
the secret places of the life of man. In the breath 
of that spirit we are all journeying; no one can 
escape for a moment. But while your brother at your 
side is full of the sense of God's love, to you God 
seems the hindrance of your life ; His righteousness 
defeats your plans, His purity rebukes your lust, His 
nature and being smite you in the face like a blast 
that blows bitter and cold from a far off judgment 
day. Does God hate you and love your brother? 
No, he loves you both: but you with your disobe- 
dience are setting yourself against His love. You 
must turn round. You must be converted. xVnd then, 
when your will is by obedience confederate with the 
will of God, every breath of His presence shall be 
your joy and salvation. 

If there were not some such law as this discern- 
ible, how terrible life would be ! If man went on, 
and whether he were good or bad, whether he obeyed 
or disobeyed, there came no change in God's attitude 
to him, only one long, weak, un discriminating indul- 
gence, where w T ould be any limit to the depth of 
wickedness into which man might fall? What a moral 
chaos everywhere ! You tremble when you think of 



314 An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 

all that happening in your own family. We cannot 
picture to ourselves how dreadful it would be in the 
great family of God. 

My friends, my mission is — and more and more do 
I delight in it — to preach to you the love of God. 
I have preached that love to you to-day. But I have 
spoken to you, not as if you were sick children who 
must hear nothing but the tenderest words, but as if 
you were reasonable, responsible men and women, 
who want to face the facts of life, and who know that 
the truth is best. I have tried to show you out of the 
story of the old Hebrew King, that however God has 
chosen a soul, and given it great tasks, and surround- 
ed it with privileges, and apparently made it neces- 
sary to His designs, He will not, cannot keep that 
soul, if it is disobedient. He must let it go its way 
and take another for His work. There is no privi- 
lege which we may not turn into a curse. God does 
love you, and never will cease to love you, no matter 
where you go, no matter what you are, no matter 
through what depths of vice your soul may plunge 
in any world whose possibilities we cannot guess ; 
but His love shall be to you a spirit of help or a spirit 
of harm, according to your obedience or disobedience 
to Him. 

This is the truth to preach to men and women who 
are in the midst of the reality and the solemnity of 
life. It is strong, manly doctrine. The Bible rings 
with it. All powerful and vital Christianity is full 
of it. It is not hard and cruel. It is not v. eak and 



An Evil Spirit from the Lord. 315 

sentimental. I beg you to take this truth. Let it 
fill your life. Let it make you serious, brave, 
thoughtful, hopeful and fearful both. Let it make you 
men of God, living in His service, rejoicing in His 
love, and feeling already in your obedient souls the 
power of His everlasting life. 



SERMON XVIII. 

11 Then Jesus took unto him the twelve, and said unto them, Behold, 
we go up to Jerusalem, and all things that are written concerning 
the Son of man shall he accomplished." — Luke xviii. 30. 

EVERY true life has its Jerusalem, to which it 
is always going up. A life cannot be really 
considered as having begun to live until that far-off 
city in which its destiny awaits it, where its work is 
to be done, where its problem is to be solved, begins 
to draw the life towards itself, and the life begins to 
know and own the summons. Very strange is this 
quality of our human nature which decrees that 
unless we feel a future before us we do not live com- 
pletely in the present where we stand to-day. We 
have grown so used to it that we do not realize how 
strange it is. It seems to us to be necessary. But 
the lower natures, the beasts, do not seem to have 
anything like it. And we can easily picture to 
ourselves a human nature which might have been 
created so that it never should think about the 
future, but should get all its inspiration out of pre- 
sent things. But that is not our human nature. It 

no 



Going up to Jerusalem. 317 

always must look forward. The thing which it 
hopes to become is already a power and decides the 
thing it is. 

And so every true life has its Jerusalem to which 
it is always going up. At first far off and dimly 
seen, laying but light hold upon our purpose and 
our will, then gradually taking us more and more 
into its power, compelling our study, directing the 
current of our thoughts, arranging our friendships 
for us, deciding for us what powers we shall bring 
out into use, deciding for us what we shall be : so 
every live man's Jerusalem, his sacred city, calls 
to him from the hill-top where it stands. One 
man's Jerusalem is his profession. Another man's 
Jerusalem is his fortune. Another man's Jerusa- 
lem is his cause. Another man's Jerusalem is his 
faith. Another man's Jerusalem is his character. 
Another man's Jerusalem is his image of purified 
society and a worthy human life. You stop the 
student at his books, the philanthropist at his com- 
mittee, the saint at his prayers. You say to each of 
them, " What does it all mean ? What are you 
doing ? What is it all for ? " And the answer is 
everywhere the same: "Behold we go up to Jeru- 
salem." We draw back the vail of history, and 
everywhere it is the same picture that we see. Com- 
panies, great and small, climbing mountains to 
where sacred cities stand awaiting them with open 
gates upon the top. The man who is going up to 
no Jerusalem is but the ghost and relic of a man. 
He has in him no genuine and healthy human life. 



3 1 8 Going up to Jerusalem. 

There never was an exhibition of all this so fine 
and perfect as that which we see in Jesus. His 
manhood shines out nowhere so clear and strong as 
here. Think how his life gets its glory and beauty 
from the way in which it is always, from the very 
first, tending on to the thing which it was at last to 
reach. That tendency began at his birth, and it 
never ceased until he was hanging on the cross out- 
side the city gate. Then he had come to Jerusalem 
and it was finished. The angels sang about Jerusa- 
lem when the shepherds heard them. The boy's 
thoughts were full of Jerusalem as he worked in the 
carpenter's shop. Egypt, where they carried the 
babe to get him out of danger was on the way to 
Jerusalem, where he was finally to be killed. The 
visit to the temple when he was twelve years old, 
was a nearer glimpse of the Jerusalem to which he 
did not then really come, though his feet trod its 
streets, but which he then accepted as the only suf- 
ficent issue of his life. He was baptized in consecra- 
tion to the life-long journey to Jerusalem. " For this 
cause was I born. For this cause came I into the 
world." " My time is not yet come." Those words, 
and words like those, dropped here and there, along 
his path, are like foot-prints in the road he walked, 
all pointing to Jerusalem. At last he came there, 
and in the tragedy of Good Friday he laid clown his 
life. He had reached Jerusalem at last. The most in- 
tense, persistent purpose that the world had ever seen, 
had reached its completion. He had come to the 
Jerusalem of his intention, and mankind was saved. 



Going up to Jerusalem. 319 

With Christ as the great image and pattern of it 
all before us, let us speak this morning of the Jeru- 
salem of every life, the steady tendency of every life 
to come to some appointed result of Avhich it is grow- 
ingly conscious as it moves upon its way towards it. 
Let us speak first of the existence of such a result, 
and then of the struggle by which it is reached. 

First, then, may we not say that the appointed re- 
sult of any man's life will consist of his character 
multiplied by his circumstances. Find the product 
of that multiplication, and you can surely tell what 
the man will attain. It is because both of these 
terms are vague ; because, look as deep into him as 
you will, you cannot read his character perfectly; 
and because, study his circumstances as carefully as 
you may, you cannot tell just what is going to hap- 
pen ; for these two causes, the final issue of his life is 
not entirely clear; the Jerusalem to which he is 
travelling, is vague and cloudlike. And yet it is 
good, indeed it is necessary, for us to know that both 
of these elements do enter into the decision of a 
man's life, and that neither of them must be left out. 
You leave out a man's character, and think that his 
circumstances only must control his destiny, and at 
once you are a fatalist. On the other hand you leave 
out his circumstances, and think only of his charac- 
ter, and you have set a premium on wilfulness. At 
once men go about complaining that the circum- 
stances, which they did not take into account, are 
hindering them from being what they have found it, 
they think, in their characters to be ! 



320 Going up to Jerusalem. 

But see ! here is a man who has heard the doctrine 
which I have preached thus far in this sermon. He 
wants to apply that doctrine to himself. " Where is 
my Jerusalem ? " he says. " What is there to which 
my life is moving? What is there which I must 
hope ultimately to attain ?" That man, I say, must 
multiply his character by his circumstances and see 
what the product is. He finds himself by character 
a scholar, and by circumstances a citizen of America 
in the nineteenth century after Christ. Those two 
things he must put together. As the result, a cer- 
tain image of scholarship, humane, practical, broad, 
hopeful, distinctly modern, distinctly different from 
mediaeval scholarship, burns before him on the hill. 
On that his eye must be fastened. To that his feet 
must struggle. 

Or he might have found himself a man with a 
soldier's heart in the third century, or with a saint's 
heart in the first century, or with a discoverer's dis- 
position in the fifteenth century. The time and the 
man together decree the possible career. 

Or, if you talk of it within a narrower range ; here 
in town there is a man poor and full of enterprise ; 
there is a rich man all alive with sympathy; there 
is a quiet, meditative soul, pushed on by the accidents 
of its existence into perpetual contact with fellow- 
men; there is a brilliant flashing genius doomed to 
solitude. In either case it is the condition and the 
man, it is the- circumstances and the character mul- 
tiplied into each other which make the life. The 
circumstances are the brick and mortar; the cha- 



Going tip to Jerusalem. 



racter is like the architect's design ; out of the two 
Jerusalem is built. 

He then who would know his Jerusalem must 
know both of these elements. He must know him- 
self and he must know his conditions. See how at 
once the full activity of man is called for. You can- 
not simply look at what other men are doing and 
see in their activity the disposition of your time 
and fling yourself out into their forms of action, re- 
gardless of the fitnesses and the limitations which 
are in your own nature. On the other hand you 
cannot just study yourself and then demand that 
the age and the place in which you find yourself 
shall take you and find use for you, however you 
may be out of harmony with its disposition and its 
needs. From both of those causes there have come 
great failures. Who are the men who have suc- 
ceeded in the best way? Who are the men avIio 
have done good work while they lived, and have left 
their lives like monuments for the inspiration of 
mankind? They are the men who have at once 
known themselves in reference to their circumstan- 
ces, and known their circumstances in reference to^ 
themselves; true men, sure of their own individual- 
ity, sure of their own distinctness and difference 
from every other human life, sure that there was nev- 
er another man just like them since the world be- 
gan, that therefore they had their own duties, their 
own rights, their own work to do, and way to do it; 
but men also who questioned the circumstances in 

which they found themselves, and asked what was 
21 



322 Going tip to Jerusalem. 

the best thing which any man in just those circum- 
stances might set himself to do ? These are the 
men before whom there rises by-and-by a dream, 
which later gathers itself into a hope, and at last 
solidifies into an achievement. It is something 
which only they can do, because of their distinctness 
and uniqueness. It is something which even they 
could not do in any other circumstances than just 
these in which they do it now. Columbus discovers 
America because he is Columbus, and because the 
study of geography and the enterprise of man have 
reached to just this point. Luther kindles the Ref- 
ormation because he is Luther, and because the dry 
wood of the papacy has come to just the right in- 
flammability. You and I, who are not Luthers nor 
Columbuses, but simply, by the grace of God, earnest, 
true-hearted men, conceive some purpose for our 
lives and keep it clear before us, praying we may 
not die before we do it; and at last doing it before 
we die, because we are we, and because the world in 
which we live is just the world it is. It is every 
young man's place to realize, to make real to him- 
self, both himself and his circumstances, what he 
is and where he is. Are the young men here doing 
that? If they are not, their lives are stagnant or 
drifting, and who knows which of these two is 
worse ? But if they are, then there is certainly shap- 
ing itself in the misty future a purpose of their 
life which slowly will grow clear to them, which 
they will pursue with ever deeper joy and ardor, 
which they will humbly rejoice in when they come 



Going up to Jerusalem. 



to die, and which men will thank God for, long after 
they are dead ! 

" But how shall I realize myself and my circum- 
stances ?" some one says. I wish that I could make 
you see it as clearly as it seems to me. The answer 
is that you must realize them both in God. Jerusa- 
lem, as we go up to it, shines through its atmosphere 
to us. We see it through and because of the vital 
air which is poured around both it and us. Now 
God is the atmosphere in which we " live and move 
and have our being." He made our characters, and 
He made our circumstances, and it is His hand that 
moulds the two together and bids arise into exist- 
ence out of them a definite, appropriate purpose for 
our life, a thing for us to be and do. 

Here are you, let us say, who have seriously decided 
that you will be a lawyer in this city and this time. 
If you have come to that decision seriously and 
intelligently, and not by mere whim, you have reach- 
ed it by a knowledge of your character and your 
circumstances, as I tried to describe. You have rec- 
ognized certain powers in yourself, and certain needs 
in the community. Tell me, will it not make both 
of those recognitions clearer if behind them both you 
put the thought, the certainty, of God ? If you are 
able to think of One who made you for your time, 
and made your time for you; if you are able to see, 
with the eye of faith, as we say, the eye which sees 
the unseen — if you are able to see the divine wisdom 
and foresight standing with your nature in its 
hands, and saying, " This nature will need such 



324 Going up to Jerusalem. 

and such chances," and so making for it this Bos- 
ton and this profession of the law, and also see 
that same wisdom and foresight standing with this 
Boston and this legal profession in its sight, and say- 
ing, " They will need such and such a man," and so 
making you. " Ah," you say, in your mock humility, 
" I cannot really think that I am of as much conse- 
quence as that." "Ah," you say, in your crude inde- 
pendence, " I will not let any power choose and 
appoint my life for me. I will do it for myself." 
Let the two outbursts modify and rectify each other. 
Let your humility make you rejoice that God has ap- 
pointed for you the Jerusalem up to which the whole 
journey of your life must climb. Let your instinct of 
independence, your instinct of personal life, give you 
assurance that God cannot have chosen your Jerusa- 
lem for you so absolutely that it will not rest with 
you to find the way to it through every bewilder- 
ment, and to keep it continually in your sight. 

All this is illustrated in the life of him to whom 
the picture of our text belongs. The life of Jesus 
Christ is full of this atmosphere of God. He calls 
Himself, "Him whom the Father hath sanctified and 
sent into the world." What does that mean but 
just what I have been saying ? God made the world 
and He sent Jesus. The world needed Jesus the 
Saviour, and Jesus the Saviour bore in His myste- 
rious nature the power to save the world. The two 
met and there was Jerusalem, the sacred city, the 
city where the sacrifices had smoked in prophecy for 
years ; the city where Herod and Pilate tarried for 



Going lip to Jerusalem. 325 

their victim; the city where the judgment-seat, the 
condemnation, the cross, the resurrection morning 
were waiting. As Jesus goes up to that Jerusalem, 
He goes because He is He, and Jerusalem is Jerusa- 
lem, and because both are themselves in God ; because 
the Father hath sanctified him and sent him into 
the world. When he came there and the cross seized 
and held him, character and circumstances had per- 
fectly met in their complete result. The Saviour- 
hood and the world's need of being saved had come 
together, and here was salvation. 

"Would it not be a vast thing for us if we could be 
far more aware than we are now of some such great 
Christlike sweep of our lives towards a purpose? 
The truth which Jesus first manifested in his living, 
and then taught in his doctrine, the truth that man is 
the child of God, is pregnant with that consciousness. 
Whenever any man has learned it he grows strong 
and eager. He no longer loiters and plays. A friend 
comes to you and says, "Do this with me ! " And 
you quietly reply to him, " I cannot; " and he answers 
you, " Why not ? " And you say, " I am going up 
to Jerusalem." There is an end of it. You have not 
to sit on a stone at the road side, undetermined, until 
every speculative question has been settled, until 
you have decided just whether the thing is wrong, 
and just how wrong it is, and just how bad it is for 
this other man to do it, and just how near a thing to 
it you may allow yourself to do. Simply the thing 
is not on the way to your Jerusalem, and so you 
press on past it and leave it far behind. Ah, how 



326 Going up to Jerusalem. 

men spend their time in debating just how wrong 
things are, which, whether they be more or less 
wrong, these men know that it is not for them 
to do. It is as if a traveller in a great highway 
refused to pass by the opening of any side lane until 
he knew just how deep was the bog or the wilderness 
into which the lane would lead him if he followed 
it, which he has no idea of doing. The power of an 
apprehended purpose saves us from all that. The 
hope of our Jerusalem draws us on, and will not let 
us stop. 

And, to come to the second part of what I want 
to say, this power of our purpose, this attraction of 
Jerusalem, is not destroyed, nay, is not weakened, 
nay, is intensified and strengthened, when the vail is 
lifted, and it is distinctly shown to us that our pur- 
pose can be attained only by struggle and self-sacri- 
fice and pain. This surely is one of the most inter- 
esting things in all our study of mankind. I see a 
man who has caught sight of how his character and 
his circumstances unite to designate for him a cer- 
tain work and destiny. He is inspired by the vision. 
He has set out with all his soul to realize it. I can 
see lions in the way which he cannot see. I dread 
to tell him of the deserts he must cross, the fires 
through which he must force his way before He can 
go into that open gate, and be what he has made up 
his mind to be. At last I feel myself compelled to tell 
him, and I do tell him with a trembling heart. I look 
to see him falter and sink down, or else turn and run. 
Instead of that I see his eye kindle; his whole face 



Going up to Jerusalem. 327 

glows; his frame stiffens with intense resolution, 
and I see him a thousand times more eager than 
before to do this thing which he has recognized as 
his. Listen to Jesus as he says the words following 
our text: " Behold we go up to Jerusalem, and all 
things which are written concerning the Son of man 
shall be accomplished. For he shall be delivered 
unto the Gentiles, and shall be mocked and spitefully 
entreated and spitted on, and they shall scourge him 
and pat him to death." What a catalogue of miseries ! 
How clear and how certain they evidently are, as 
we hear through the ages that calm voice rehearsing 
them, while the Lord and the disciples walk along 
the road. But tell me, as we hear that voice through 
the ages, is there any faltering in it because of these 
miseries which it foretells ? Are you not sure that 
the steadfast feet go pressing on all the more stead- 
fastly as they keep time to the tragical catalogue 
which the calm lips are telling ? O this is a won- 
derful power in man, this power which shines out 
supremely in the Man of men, this power to be 
inspired by danger, and to desire a good and great 
thing all the more because of the deserts and the 
fire and the death which must be gone through for 
its attainment ! 

We hear it said sometimes that it was wonderful that 
Jesus, having undertaken the world's salvation, did 
not draw back at the sight of the cross. Would it not 
have been wonderful if, being Jesus, he had drawn 
back and refused to go up to Jerusalem because of 
what was waiting for him there ? Can we imagine 



328 Going up to Jerusalem. 

that ? 'Would we not have said at once, " No, he 
is not the Christ I thought he was — or else the 
cross with all its terrors never could have frightened 
Him." 

J think the same is true of all devoted souls — of 
all souls who have really seen their Jerusalem and set 
their faces towards it. I do not expect them — they 
ought not to expect themselves — to be turned back 
by the difficulties and terrors which stand in the 
way. (The wonders of life are not in deeds, but in 
characters. Given the character, the deed does not 
surprise me. Let me look into the martyr's soul and 
see the perfect consecration which is burning there, 
and then there is no wonder in my spirit when I see 
him walking next clay to the stake as to a festival. 
The wonder would be if I saw him turn and run 
away. Let me thoroughly understand bow the 
humble missionary loves his Master and thinks that 
Master's service the one precious thing on earth, and 
then I can perfectly comprehend why he turns his 
ship's prow all the m ore steadfastly shoreward when 
the savages come howling down to the beach to seek 
his blood. The wonder is that they should be the 
men they are. When they once are the men they 
are, the things that they do are not wonderful. 

No deed is wonderful except in relation to the 
strength which does it. It would be wonderful that 
a robin should swim, but it is not wonderful that 
a fish should swim. It would be wonderful if you 
or I should write a Hamlet. It was not wonderful 
that Shakespeare should do it. The wonder is 



Going up to Jerusalem. 329 

that he should be Shakespeare; but, he being 
Shakespeare, Hamlet is no miracle. It would be 
unspeakably wonderful if any man should stand 
upon the mountain top and bid the morning rise out 
of the sea. But God does it day by day, and we are 
not astonished. Granted God, and what deed of God 
is marvellous ? God is so marvellous that He ex- 
hausts all marvel in Himself. God is the one only 
wonder of the universe. With Him in the universe, 
the most stupendous prodigies are natural. 

What does this mean for us ? What is its bearing 
on our lives? Something very direct and definite, I 
think. If you are going up to Jerusalem, and as you 
go you become aware that you can only reach your 
Jerusalem, your purpose, through suffering, perhaps 
through death. What then ? Where shall you look 
for your release, and the solution of your fear ? Shall 
you expect it in the change of circumstances, in the 
muzzling o the lions so that they shall not bite you, 
in the palsying of death so that it shall not kill you ? 
No ! you must seek it in the strengthening of your 
own life, so that it shall be nothing strange for you, 
being the man you are, to scorn the lions and to 
laugh at death. 

Men watch you. They say, Is it possible that he 
will not be frightened, but will go on to his ap- 
pointed end through everything? You, knowing 
your own heart, are sure that you will not be fright- 
ened, sure that you will indeed go on. Some friend 
who really knows you, quietly says, " Yes, he will 
conquer," and evidently thinks it nothing strange. 



330 Going up to Jerusalem. 

It is no gift of prophecy in him. It is simply that he 
does know you, and knowing your strength, the trial 
that awaits it does not seem too great, 
i 0, do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger 
men ! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. 
Pray for powers equal to your tasks ■!! Then the do- 
ing of your work shall be no miracle. But you shall 
be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at your- 
self, at the richness of life which has come in you 
by the grace of God. 

There is nothing which comes to seem more foolish 
to us, I think, as years go by, than the limitations 
which have been quietly set to the moral possibili- 
ties of man. They are placedly and perpetually as- 
sumed. "You must not expect too much of him," 
so it is said. " You must remember that he is only a 
man, after all." "Only a man !" That sounds to me 
as if one said, " You may launch your boat and sail 
a little way, but you must not expect to go very far. 
It is only the Atlantic Ocean." Why man's moral 
range and reach is practically infinite, at least no 
man has yet begun to comprehend where its limits 
lies. Man's powers of conquering temptation, of 
despising danger, of being true to principle, have 
never been even indicated, save in Christ. " Only a 
man ! " that means only a Son of God; and who can 
begin to say what a Son of God, claiming his Father, 
may become and be and do ? 

Therefore the fact that with our purpose clear be- 
fore us, with something which we believe that it is 
our place to accomplish in the world, there still are 



Going up to Jerusalem. 331 

fears and pains and difficulties in the way, that fact 
may not have any power except a power of inspira- 
tion. You tell the mother that her child is in dan- 
ger, and that she cannot save it except by vast self- 
sacrifice, and the question never arises for an instant 
whether the sacrifice shall be undertaken and the 
child saved. The whole power of the tidings is 
just to summon a deeper flood of that self-sacrifice 
which is the very essence of her motherhood, and 
which laughs at danger with a quiet scorn. 

So may it be with you ! I look across this con- 
gregation and I know that to many of these young 
eyes some Jerusalem has shown itself, some pur- 
pose far away upon its hill. You have multiplied 
your character into your circumstances and seen 
what you ought to do with your life. I bid you 
know it is not easy to attain your hope. I bid 
you clearly know that if the life which you have 
chosen to be your life is really worthy of you, 
it involves self-sacrifice and pain. If your Jerusa- 
lem really is your sacred city, there is certainly a 
cross in it. What then ? Shall you flinch and draw 
back ? Shall you ask for yourself another life ? 
no, not another life, but another self. Ask to be 
born again. Ask God to fill you with Himself, and 
then calmly look up and go on. Go up to Jerusa- 
lem expecting all things that are written concern- 
ing you to be fulfilled. Disappointment, mortifica- 
tion, misconception, enmity, pain, death, these may 
come to you, but if they come to you in doing your 
duty it is all right. " It cannot be that a prophet 



33 2 Going up to Jerusalem. 

perish out of Jerusalem," said Jesus. "It is dread- 
ful to suffer except in doing duty. To suffer there is 
glorious. " That is our translation of his words into 
our own life. 

May God let us all first see our Jerusalem and 
then attain it. What is that prayer but the great 
prayer of our Collect in the Prayer Book — that by 
his holy inspiration we may think those things 
that are good, and by his merciful guiding may per- 
form the same, through our Lord Jesus Christ, 
Amen. 



SERMON XIX. 

"They shall take up serpents, arid if they drink any deadly thing it 
shall not harm them. They shall lay hands on the sick and they 
shall recover." — Mark xvi. 18. 

THESE are the last words that Jesus spoke on 
earth. The next verse says, " So then after the 
Lord had spoken nnto them, he was received up 
into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God." 
Trie cloud which hid their Master from the disciples' 
sight left these words of promise still ringing in 
their ears. " These signs shall follow them that 
believe," he said. And those who knew that they 
believed in him must have turned and gone back 
from the scene of the ascension, with eyes full of 
the expectation of miracle. By-and-by they began 
to see the fulfilment of the promises. When Peter 
and John went through the Beautiful Gate into the 
Temple, and looking upon the lame man bade him, 
" In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up 
and walk," and "he leaping up stood and walked," 
the disciples who stood by must have looked into 

one another's faces and said, "Yes, this is what the 

333 



334 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

Master promised." When Paul at Melita shook off 
the viper into the fire and felt no hurt, the words of 
the Lord must have come back to them, and they 
must have said, " Behold still the signs that He 
foretold should follow them that believe." And no 
doubt they were right. Christ's farewell words did 
find such fulfilment for a time. But by-and-by there 
came a change. Those miracles became more and 
more rare. Men still believed, but their belief gave 
them less and less power over material nature. 
Perhaps then the disciples grew bewildered and per- 
plexed. Can it be that the power of Christ's promise 
is exhausted ? Had his gift a limit so that it has lost 
its virtue ? But as they asked that question, gradually 
they must have become aware of a more profound 
fulfilment of the promise. No longer over outer and 
material things, but now over the inner and spirit- 
ual life, the power of faith began to show itself. No 
longer over the danger of the serpents which the hands 
could handle, or of the sicknesses which flushed the 
cheek with fever or crippled the tortured limbs, did 
their belief prove itself mighty. The serpents of the 
soul, the sicknesses of the heart and mind, they 
learned to see that these were more dangerous 
enemies, and that their faith came to its supreme 
test when it grappled with and tried to conquer 
these. This conviction grew with the deepening 
spiritual life of Christianity, until at last the words 
changed their tone, and now it is a promise of spirit- 
ual victory over spiritual difficulties, when the dis- 
ciple hears his Lord declare, " You shall take up 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 335 

serpents, and if you touch any deadly thing it shall 
not harm you. You shall lay hands on the sick 
and they shall recover." 

It is in this fullest sense of course that I want to 
study the great eternal promise of Christ with you 
this morning. It is as bright to-day as it was on 
that fresh morning when our Lord passed into the 
cloud which still hides him from our sight. Nay, it 
is brighter. The sun that goes behind a cloud al- 
ways diffuses its light over the heavens not instantly 
at its first disappearance, but not till some few mo- 
ments after the cloud has hidden it, and when the 
cloud itself helps to diffuse the light of the sun which 
it has hidden. So when Christ became unseen, the 
world only gradually learned the richness and com- 
pleteness of his unseen presence. And so we are 
studying not something whose glory is outworn, but 
something whose light is growing brighter in the 
world continually, when we study the promise of the 
ascending Christ. 

The promise then is this: that the believer shall 
drink poison and it shall not harm him, and that life 
shall go out of him to cure the sick. And first of all 
we must notice what is the cause of privileges such 
as these. Then we shall better understand the full 
nature of the privileges. These signs are to follow 
"them that believe." It is to men who believe, 
through their belief, that privileges such as these 
are to be given. The essence and ground of the pro- 
mised power is faith. That old word, Faith ! That 
old thing, Faith ! How men have stumbled over its 



3 3 6 The Safety and Helpfu Iness of Fa itk. 

definition and bewildered and en snarled themselves 
and those who heard them! God forbid that 1 should 
bewilder you to-day. I want to be as clear and sim- 
ple as I can; and though I would be far from disparag- 
ing any of the subtler and more elaborate descriptions 
of what faith is, I am sure that we may give our- 
selves a definition which is true beyond all doubt, and 
which is full enough to answer all the need of defini- 
tion which we shall meet to-day. Faith then, personal 
faith, is this, the power by which one being's vitality, 
through love and obedience, becomes the vitality of 
another being. Simple enough that is, I am sure, for 
any man who will think. I believe in you, my friend ; 
and your vitality, your character, your energy, the 
more I love and obey you, passes over into me. 
The saint believes in his pattern saint, the soldier 
believes in his brave captain, the scholar believes in 
his learned teacher. In every case the vitality of 
the object of faith comes through love and obedi- 
ence to the believer. Faith is not love nor obedience, 
but it works by both. A man may love me and yet 
not have faith in me. A man may obey me, and yet 
not have faith in me. Faith is a distinct relation be- 
tween soul and soul ; but it is recognizable by this re- 
sult, that the life of one soul becomes the life of the 
other soul through obedience and love. Now faith in 
Christ, what is it ? Just in the same simple way, it 
is that power by which the vitality of Christ, through 
our love and obedience to Him, becomes our vitality. 
The triumph of the believing soul is this, that he 
does not live by himself; that into him is ever flow- 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 337 

ing, by a law which is both natural and supernatural, 
a law that is supernatural only because it is the con- 
summation and transfiguration of the most natural of 
all laws — there is always flowing into him the vital- 
ity of the Christ whom he loves and obeys. His 
whole nature beats with the inflow of that divine 
life. He lives, but Christ lives in him. 

And then add one thing more. That this vitality 
of Christ which comes into a man by faith, is not a 
strange and foreign thing. Christ is the Son of 
Man, the perfect man, the divine man. Add this, 
and then we know that his vitality filling us is the 
perfection of human life filling humanity. "They 
that believe" are not men turned into something 
else than men, by the mixture of a new and strange 
divine ingredient. They are men in whom human 
life is perfect in proportion to the completeness of 
their faith through the Son of Man. They are men 
raised to the highest power. The man in whom 
Christ dwells by faith is tne man in whom the 
divine ideal of human life is perfect, or is steadily 
becoming perfect, by the entrance into him of the 
perfect life of the man Christ Jesus, through obedi- 
ence and love. 

And now turn back to our promise. These signs 
shall follow them that believe, them that have the 
complete human life by me — Christ says. " If they 
drink any deadly thing it shall not harm them — and 
they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall re- 
cover." Is that a prize ? Is it wages which is offer- 
ed for a certain meritorious act which is called faith ? 
22 



33 8 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

Not so, surely ! It is a consequence. It is a neces- 
sity. Safety and helpfulness. These come out of the 
full life of Christ in the soul of man as the inevitable 
fruits. Safety, so that what hurts other men shall 
not hurt him. Helpfulness, so that his brethren about 
him shall live by his life. These are the utterances 
of the vitality of him who is thoroughly alive. See 
what we have reached already. It is by life, by 
full, vigorous, emphatic existence that men are safe 
in this world, and that they save other men from 
death. I glory in such a statement as that. It 
makes my Bible shine. Men everywhere are trying 
to be safe by stifling life ; by living just as low as pos- 
sible. Men everywhere are trying not to do one 
another harm, trying to spare each other's souls by 
tender petting, by guarding them against any 
vigorous contact with life and thought. The Bible 
comes glowing with protest. " Not so," it says. 
" Only by the fulness of life does safety come. On- 
ly by the power of contact with life are sick and help- 
less souls made whole. None but the live man saves 
himself or quickens the dead to life; saves himself 
or saves his neighbor." It is a noble assertion. The 
whole Bible, from its first page to its last, is full of 
the assertion of the fundamental necessity of vitali- 
ty ; that the first thing which a man needs in order 
to live well, is to live. 

Let us take now these two parts of the promise of 
Christ in turn. He tells his disciples that if they 
believe in him, they shall drink deadly things and 
not be harmed, and thev shall be able to heal the 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 



00" 



sick. Safety and helpfulness, these are the two 
privileges of full life; these two together make a suc- 
cessful and complete career. And first let us consider 
the safety which Christ offers. Notice it is a safety 
not by the avoidance of deadly things, but by the 
neutralizing of them through a higher and stronger 
power. There is no such idle promise as that if a 
man believes in Christ a wall shall be built around 
his soul, so that the things out of which souls make sin 
cannot come to him. The Master knew the world 
too well for that. His own experience on the hill of his 
temptation was still fresh in his memory. He knew 
that life meant exposure, that sin must surely beat 
at every one of these hearts. Nay, that the things 
out of which sin is made, temptation, moral trial, 
must enter into every heart; and so he said not, "I 
will lead you through secluded ways where none but 
sweet and healthy w r aters flow :" but, " Where I lead 
you there will be the streams of poison. Only if you 
have the vitality which comes by faith in me, your 
life shall be stronger than the poison's death ; if you 
drink any deadly thing it shall not harm you." 

One thing we see immediately in such a promise, 
one condition which belongs to its fulfilment. It 
is that only in the higher action and mission lay the 
safety from the lower influence ; and therefore that the 
lower influence was to be powerless over the disciples 
only as they met it incidentally in the direct pur- 
suance of their higher task. Jesus had made this 
same promise once before. When he sent the sev- 
enty disciples out to preach, he said to them almost 



340 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith, 



exactly these same words, which now he said as he 
looked into his disciples' eyes for the last time on 
Olivet. They too were to find the deadly things 
they touched robbed of their venom. The poison 
was to be harmless as they drank it. But then 
Christ spoke it of their special mission. It was while 
they went on this particular preaching journey that 
the pestilential powers of nature were to lose their 
mischief. But now, on Olivet, he is giving his dis- 
ciples a life-long career. He is sending them forth 
consecrated to a service which is to last until they 
die. So now the special promise becomes general, 
and covers all their life ; now they are constantly to 
be armed against the poison; but still the essence of 
safety is to be in their perpetual mission, their 
unbroken consecration. It was not that they might 
sit down at ease and drink what pleasant poison 
they would, and yet be unharmed. It was only while 
they were living, believing, working, only as they 
lived and believed and worked, that they were safe. 
And the meaning of that, when we translate it 
into the terms of our life, is clear enough. Only 
those temptations which we encounter on the way of 
duty, in the path of consecration, only those has our 
Lord promised us that we shall conquer. He sends 
us out to live and work for him. The chances of 
sin which we meet while that divine design of life, 
the life and work for Him, is clear before us, shall 
not hurt us. When we forget that design, our arm 
withers, our immunity is gone. This is what we 
really mean, what we often put blindly enough, when 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 341 

we ask whether such a man is a religious man or 
not. We mean, or we ought to mean, whether relig- 
ion or the service of God is present with him as a 
continual purpose; not whether he is ever tempted; 
not whether he ever sins; we know the answers to 
those questions well enough ; but whether behind 
all the temptation, under all the sin, his soul is 
still set toward God with genuine and strong devo- 
tion. If it is, we know that he must come out safe. 
This is the real question after which men are often 
fumbling when they seem to make some mere out- 
side thing like an amulet worn about the neck, or a 
church-membership written in a book, a pledge and 
token that what would be sin to other men is not 
sin to some privileged, protected soul. 

It is only when we are about some higher task, 
only when they meet us as accidents in the service 
of Christ, that we have a right deliberately to en- 
counter temptation and the chance to sin, and may 
claim the Lord's promise of immunity. Think in 
how many places that law applies. Have I a right 
to read this skeptical book, this book in which some 
able, witty man has gathered all his skill against 
my Christian faith? It is a book of poison. Have I 
a right to drink it ? Who can say absolutely yes or 
no ? Who does not feel that it depends upon what 
sort of life the reader brings to meet the poison ? If 
in your soul there is a passionate desire for truth, 
if you do really love and serve Christ, and want to 
know him better that you may love and serve him 
more, if this book comes as a help to that, part of a 



342 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

study by which you shall get nearer to the heart of 
the truth and him, then if you drink that deadly 
thing it shall not harm you. Nay, you may rise up 
from the reading with a faith more deep. Whatever 
change your faith may undergo, it shall win a pro- 
founder life. But if there is no such earnestness, no 
such life as this, if it is mere curiosity, mere desire to 
be fine and liberal, mere defiance, a mere wanton- 
ness, then the poison has it all its own way ; there is 
no vigorous life to meet it ; and its death spreads 
through the nature till it finds the heart. 

This is the only true discrimination. The old 
policy which makes indexes of forbidden books can 
never do anything for faith. Whatever a man can 
read in honesty and humility and consecration, and 
the pure desire of truth, let him read it; and if there 
be any deadly thing in what he reads it shall not 
harm him. I say this solemnly, deliberately, 
thoughtfully, knowing that many young people are 
hearing, and I hope are noting what I say. I say it 
without hesitation ; only I beg you to remember how 
profound are the conditions which alone give one the 
right to read the skeptics and yet hope to keep 
his faith. It is a solemn thing for a man first to be 
sure that he has indeed honesty, humility, consecra- 
tion, and the pure desire of truth. The very solemn- 
ity and responsibility with which he searches him- 
self that he may be sure of that, will be his safest 
safeguard. 

There are dabblers in unbelief on every side of us, 
who are being poisoned through and through by the 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 343 

scepticism which they drink in. There are other men 
who know vastly more than they about what unbelief 
has said, who are more full of real faith for all their 
study. Everything depends upon the state in which 
their spiritual constitutions met the struggle and upon 
what it was that took them into the midst of doubt. 
And so it is eveywhere with all exposures of the 
spiritual life. "What took you there?" " What right 
had you to be there ? " These are the critical ques- 
tions on which everything depends. If you are 
passing through temptation with your eye fixed on 
a pure, true life beyond it, temptation being only a 
necessary stage upon your way, so long as you 
keep that purpose, that resolution, that ideal, you 
shall be safe. If you are in temptation for tempta- 
tion's sake, with no purpose beyond it, you are lost. 

Two men walk through the vilest streets here in 
our city. One of them has nothing in him but self- 
ishness and low love of self-indulgence. The other 
is glowing with human charity, seeking perhaps 
some child of his who has wandered into that dread- 
ful hell, or longing, it may be, to pluck out of the 
burning some man's or woman's life, whose fiery ini- 
quity makes those streets the streets of hell. Why 
is it that one man fills himself full of the iniquity 
through which he walks, steeps himself in its vile- 
ness, and the other comes out with garments all the 
whiter for the fire ? Is it not what Jesus said, " This 
sign shall follow them that believe. If they drink 
any deadly thing it shall not harm them " ? 

Two men go into politics. One of them wants office ; 



344 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

the other wants honesty in government, faithfulness 
to national obligation, the preservation of the public 
purity and credit. What shall be their personal fate, 
the fate of their personal characters there, in the 
political turmoil ? One of them has no faith. It is 
faith that sends the other where perhaps his feet half 
refuse to go. According to their faith so is it unto 
them. And when, while one man sinks from depth to 
depth of unscrupulous selfishness and shameless cor- 
ruption, the other seems to breathe the foulest air 
without a weakness or a taint, I seem to see as clear 
a fulfilment as the world can show, of that which 
Jesus said, "This sign shall follow them that believe. 
If they drink any deadly thing it shall not harm 
them." 

The religious man who lives and works in one 
church, one denomination, is saved from the poison 
of narrowness and sectarianism by the larger faith 
with which he believes and rejoices in the work of 
Christ his Master, and the salvation of men his 
brethren, wherever he can see it going on. The 
woman in social life bears a charmed life through all 
its deadening frivolity, because the life of Christ is in 
her, and she ever counts herself and all of those 
whom her life touches in the lightest contact, the 
children of God, sacred, and capable of pure and 
beautiful life. Everywhere the amulet is faith, some 
great idea, some large, long hope. Everywhere, 
where death rages most wantonly, " the just shall 
live by faith." 

What would you say to the young man who you 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 345 

knew was asked to go into some dangerous trade ? 
Not a trade where boilers sometimes exploded or 
where poisonous gases crept into the lungs, but a 
trade where honesty was constantly beseiged, or 
where temperance was hourly solicited, or where a 
man was always dragged down towards bard and 
cynical thoughts of his fellow-men. What would you 
say to him ? If the danger was a certainty, if no man 
could possibly live in that trade and not be cursed 
with its curse, then there would be only one thing 
to say. He must not go at all. No man has any 
right to be doing that hateful business anywhere 
upon the earth, no matter how it may seem as if the 
world would suffer if all men gave it up. That case 
is plain. What shall it profit a man if he gain the 
whole world and lose his soul? But if that is not 
so. If men do live in this dangerous trade and keep 
their souls pure, what then shall you say to your 
young friend who thinks of entering into it? "Be 
sure, be sure that you have faith. Be sure that you 
are one of them that believe. Be sure that you are 
going there for something more than money. Be 
sure that you reverence the life you carry there. Be 
sure that you go there as the child of God. If you 
go so, then go, and Christ's word shall be fulfilled to 
you. In fear of him, in reverence for yourself, in 
charity for your brethren shall be your safety. And 
protected by that faith, "if you drink any deadly 
thing it shall not harm you." 

There is a deep solemnity about the sight when a 
group of young men, a generation of young men, 



346 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

come up to life together. To whom among them 
will it be life indeed? to whom will it be death? It 
is as if we saw a line of men march into a region 
where a fever raged. How we should search their 
faces to see which among them carried the vitality 
which could keep them safe. The pestilence is not 
whimsical or indiscriminate. It knows its victims 
when it sees them coming. And so the world of 
wickedness, the world of corruption, impurity and 
spiritual death — it too must know its victims. It 
too must laugh with anticipated triumph as it sees 
coming up to it a frivolous and faithless soul, must 
cringe and know its powerlessness when some man 
filled with faith, comes humbly, strong with the 
strength of Him in whom he trusts. For him the 
world in vain may mix its poisons. This is the crit- 
icalness that one feels as he sees any group of men 
beginning life; any class of young men leaving 
college; any generation meeting the novel needs and 
dangers cf a new age of the world. 

So much I say distinctively of the first part of 
Christ's promise to the faithful man. He promises 
him safety. But that is not all. Hear once again the 
other part. "If he drink any deadly thing it shall 
not harm him," and " He shall lay hands on the sick 
and they shall recover." Safety and helpfulness. 
He shall be safe and he shall save others too. These 
two things go together, not merely in this special 
promise of the Saviour, but in all life. Safety and 
helpfulness. So is the whole world bound into a 
whole, so does the good that comes to any man tend 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 347 

to diffuse itself and touch the lives of all, that these 
two things are true. First, that no man can be 
really safe, really secure that the world shall not harm 
and poison him, unless there is going out from him a 
living and life-giving influence to other men. And 
second, that no man is really helping other men unless 
there is true life in his own soul. Both of these seem 
to me to be great and ever-present truths. Men try to 
act as if they were not true, and thence comes much 
bad, useless living. Men think that they can be safe 
without being helpful, and thence come all the selfish 
notions of salvation. Merely to crawl through life 
with face, and mouth so bandaged up with caution 
that the foul air of life cannot affect us ; merely to 
strike out from the wreck of a fallen world and swim 
ashore, shaking off all the drowning men who 
clutch at us in the wild w T ater, and leaving the 
screaming wretches to their fate, the man who seeks 
salvation so, finds at last to his disappointment and 
dismay that he is not saved. It is not the hands 
that catch us and hold on to us, it is the hands of 
helpless men which we shake off in our selfishness 
that drag us down. 

And then the other truth. No man can really save 
another unless he saves himself. It is the good man 
by his good deeds that gives life to the world. The 
vitality which bad men by their bad deeds seem to 
give, is not vitality, but death. You remember how 
they taunted Jesus on the cross. " He saved others, 
Himself he cannot save," they said. But they were 
wrong. It could not be as they said. We know 



34$ The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

that he was saving himself while he saved the 
world. He was fulfilling his work. He was glori- 
fying his Father, lie was entering into life as death 
crept over him. And always it is the living, not the 
dead, who give life. It is the man not who has sin- 
ned deeply but who has known by intense sympathy 
what sin is, how strong, how terrible, and yet escaped 
it for himself. He is the man who helps the sin- 
ners most. He is the anointed one who carries on 
and carries round the Christ's salvation. In their 
deepest need the wickedest men look to the purest 
men they know; the deadest to the livest ; first to 
those who they think have most escaped sin, then 
to those who they think have been most cleansed of 
sin by repentance and forgiveness. 

These two things belong essentially together — 
Safety and Helpfulness — and both of these Jesus pro- 
mises to the men who believe in Him. Turn then for 
a few hurried moments to the second helpfulness or 
the life-giving, the life-strengthening power. " They 
shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover." 
If I read those words spiritually, if I make them the 
promise and prophecy of that wonderful power which 
in all times, in all religions, spiritual life has had to 
extend itself, like fire, from any one point which it 
has already occupied, to everything within its reach 
which is inflammable, which is capable of the same 
burning life, it seems to me that the way in which the 
promise is fulfilled is by the clothing of the believing 
life with two qualities which are expressed by these 
two words — testimony and transmission. Here is a 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith, 349 

man in whom I know that the promise of Christ is 
certainly fulfilled. He is a believer, and through his 
open faith the life of Christ flows into him constantly, 
and is his life. Full of that life, he gives it every- 
where he goes. The sick in soul touch his soul and 
are well again. The discouraged find new bravery, 
the yielding souls are clad anew with firmness. The 
frivolous grow serious, the mean are stung or 
tempted into generosity, and sinners hate their sin 
and crave a better life, wherever this man goes. Oh ! 
there are such men in the world. There always have 
been. The world finds them out, and souls half-con- 
scious of disease creep to their doors. Friends bring 
their friends into the presence of these healing lives 
as of old the men of Jerusalem ''brought forth the 
sick into the streets, and laid them on beds and 
couches, that at least the shadow of Peter pass- 
ing by might overshadow some of them." 

The power of these life-giving lives seem to me, I 
say, to be described in these two words — testimony 
and transmission. It is first in the testimony which 
they bear by the very fact of their own abundant 
life. They show the presence, they assert the possi- 
bility of vitality. And very often this is what souls 
whose spiritual life is weak and low need to have 
done for them. Men half alive grow to doubt of the 
fuller life in anybody. Men try to realize the 
descriptions of religion which they hear, and, falling 
short of them, they grow ready to believe that relig- 
ion is a thing of excited imaginations, and to give up 
all thought of making it real in themselves. It is 



350 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

not only the badness in the world, it is the dreadful 
incredulity of good, it is the despair and lack of 
struggle, which tells how low ebbs out the tide of 
spiritual life.l Then comes the man in whom spirit- 
ual life is a real, deep, strong, positive thing. The 
first work which that man does is to bear the simple 
testimony of his life that life is possible. Already, 
just in acknowledgment of that, the sick faces begin 
to revive and the sick eyes look up to him. The 
brave and godly boy among a group of boys just 
learning to be proud of godlessness and contemptuous 
of piety — the man of golden principles among the 
skeptics of the street —the one true penitent rejoic- 
ing in a new and certain hope out of the ranks of 
flagrant sin — these instantly, the moment that they 
begin to live, begin to bear their testimony of life, 
and so make life about them. The hand just trem- 
bling with the mute and awed but certain conscious- 
ness of its own new life, though it be but a child's hand, 
feeling for support, there is a wondrous power in it, 
if it falls upon some poor decrepit faithless soul, to 
work there the fulfilment of the Saviour's promise 
that they which believe shall lay hands on the sick 
and they shall recover. 

And besides testimony I also said transmission. 
The highest statement of the culture of a human 
nature and of the best attainment that is set before 
it, is that, as it grows better, it grows more transpar- 
ent and more simple, more capable therefore of sim- 
ply and truly transmitting the life and will of God 
which is behind it. The thought of a man, as he im- 



The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 351 

proves and strengthens, getting the control of his 
own powers and becoming more and more a source 
of power over other men, this thought, which has no 
doubt its own degree of truth, is limited and vulgar 
beside the breadth and fineness of the other idea, 
that as a man is trained and cultured, as the various 
events of life create their changes in him, as tempests 
beat him and sunshine bathe him, as he wrestles 
with temptation and yields to grace, as he goes on 
through the spring-time, the summer and the autumn 
of his life, the one highest purpose and result of it 
all is to beat and fuse his life into transparency, so 
that it can transmit the life of God. For all good is 
from God, and he uses our lives, all of them, to reach 
other men's lives with. Only the difference is this : 
upon a life of sin, all hard and black, God shines as 
the sun shines on the black, hard marble, and by 
reflection thence strikes on the things around, leav- 
ing the centre of the marble itself always dark. But 
on a life of obedience and faith, God shines as the 
sun shines on a block of chrystal, sending its radiance 
through the willing and transparent mass and warm- 
ing and lighting it all into its inmost depths. 

I wish that there were time to develope and de- 
scribe the privilege and power of belief to become the 
transmitter of that which it believes in. The figure 
which I have just used tells the story, and I must 
leave it with you as I abruptly close. Only remem- 
ber that no words can tell, no figure can begin to 
represent the fulness of the privilege of life which 
belongs to those who genuinely believe in Jesus 



352 The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith. 

Christ. Nothing bat his own life can tell us fully 
what the life is that he means to give to us. Safety 
and helpfulness. As safe as he was, as able to 
touch the blackest sin and yet be white, to taste of 
death and thereby be more thoroughly alive. So safe 
shall His complete disciples be. As helpful as he was ; 
as full of the testimony of life and its possibility to 
half-dead souls. As purely transparent in obedience, 
in self-forge tfulness, in essential sonship kept clear 
and unclouded by filial love. So helpful shall they be 
who believe in Him. As live as he was, nay, as live 
as he is forever, shall we be when our human life 
becomes the utterance of his, as his divine Life is 
the utterance of God's. 



SERMON XX. 

AN OLD-YEAR SERMON. 

"Let your moderation he known unto all men. The Lord is at 
hand." — Phlllippians iv. 4. 

IT is not easy to decide just what the apostles 
expected with reference to the second coming of 
the Lord. Sometimes it seemed as if they looked 
almost immediately to see the opening sky and the 
descending chariot. At other times, with a more 
general faith, they seemed to anticipate what has 
come to pass, the slow and spiritual occupation of 
the standards and purposes of human life by the 
spirit of Jesus, to be quickened at some future day 
and brought to some great consummation which it is 
impossible to describe beforehand, but which, when 
it comes, will centre about him and crown him as 
the Master of the world. Sometimes one of these 
thoughts, sometimes the other seems to represent St. 
Paul's anticipation. But, whatever was the form 
which their expectation more or less definitely 
assumed, the great fact about him and the other dis- 
ciples was that they always were expecting. Their 
33 353 



354 The Great Expectation. 

look was always forward ; and they found abundant 
clearness and abundant inspiration in their expec- 
tancy when they described the thing which they 
expected as a "coming of the Lord." "Maranatha." 
' s The Lord will come." It was one of their customs 
to greet one another with that salutation. 

We cannot probably imagine how completely this 
habit of expectation had possession of their lives. It 
must have given color and meaning to everything 
they did. Every step they took in life brought them 
a little nearer to that great end and purpose. They 
set out on a voyage, and as they turned their eyes 
away from the fading shore and looked across the 
broad waters, they seemed to be sailing out to meet 
the coming Lord. Two of them parted from each 
other, not knowing when they were to meet again, 
and they said to themselves. Whenever it is it will 
be in some nearer presence of the Lord. One of them 
moved to a new dwelling, and, as he entered into the 
door of what was to be his future home, its rooms 
became sacred to him because in them he was to 
witness the approach -of Christ; in them Christ was 
to be nearer to him than ever in the house which he 
had left behind. " Now is our salvation nearer than 
when we first believed." Those words which once 
came from the apostle's lips, expressed the feeling 
and the power which was always in all the apostles' 
hearts. 

And it has been this expectation of a coming of 
the Lord which, ever since the time of the apostles, 
has alwavs been the inspiration of the Christian 



The Great Expectation. 355 

world. ( The noblest souls always have believed that 
humanity was capable of containing, and was sure 
sooner or later to receive, a larger and deeper infusion 
of divinity. : The promise of Christianity is as yet 
but half fulfilled. All that has been done yet in all 
the Christian centuries is only the sketch and pre- 
lude of what is yet to be done. This has been the 
faith of every Christian reformer. This is what has 
made it easy for souls which loved the dear associa- 
tions of the past as much as any others, to cut loose 
from them and sail out on unknown seas. It has 
not been mere wilfulness. It has been really the 
profoundest faith. It has dared to think of human 
history not as a great flat plain on which men wan- 
dered pleasantly but aimlessly, always coming back 
afc last to the dead camp-fires where they had s'ept be- 
fore, but as a flight of shining stairs up which men 
were to struggle toilsomely but eagerly toward a day 
of the Lord, a kingdom of heaven which was waiting 
for them at the top. 

And as the noblest souls have thought of the 
world's history, so the most earnest men and women 
have always thought of their own lives. The power 
of any life lies in its expectancy. " What do you 
hope for? What do you expect?" The answer to 
these questions is the measure of the degree in which 
a man is living. He who can answer these questions 
by the declaration, " The Lord is at hand: I am ex- 
pecting a higher, deeper, more pervading mastery of 
Christ" — we know that he is thoroughly alive. 

And, as I have already intimated, one of the 



356 The Great Expectation, 

great signs of how strong life is in such a man will 
be the way in which he leaves his past. What a 
difference there is in men about that ! Some men 
are always driven out of their past and leave it only 
because they cannot stay there. Other men go 
forth from their past because they have grown 
weary and disgusted with it, and are willing to nee 
from it for pure love of change. Other men leave 
their past full of honor for it, full of gratitude for 
the equipment which it has given them for their 
future life, but full also of the attraction of the fu- 
ture in which the equipment which their past has 
given them is to be used. Here on a ship's deck 
which goes sailing out of port some day there are 
three men together. All of them are leaving the 
home-land. Behind all three alike, standing on the 
same deck, the same land fades away and is lost out 
of sight. But is it the same thing to all of them ? 
Has leaving home for all of them the same meaning ? 
One is an exile, who, having committed flagrant 
crime, is permitted to live only on condition that he 
shall leave his country and never come back to it 
again. One is an idler, who, having exhausted the 
surface of the land where he belongs, is sailing now 
to feed his restlessness in mere change, in the mere 
sight of things he never saw before. The third is a 
discoverer, who has gathered all the knowledge and 
character which he could gain at home, and is now set 
to use them in reading the secret of some hidden 
country and making the world larger for mankind. 
How different they are ! with what different eyes 



The Great Expectation. 357 

they cee the familiar shore sink down into the sea ! 
But they are not more different than are three men 
who leave any one period of life behind them and go 
out into a new one, one of them simply with the 
feeling that he cannot help himself, another with 
the vague sense that the past has grown tame and 
the future will offer something new, and the third 
with the eager hope that the Lord is at hand, that in 
the larger circumstances and with the maturer pow- 
ers he will come nearer to and know more of Christ. 
You know of course why I have thus begun to 
speak to you to-day. It is the last Sunday of 1884. 
The year which came to us twelve months ago, all 
fresh and young, is old and weary. Before next Sun- 
day a new year will come to crowd him from his place. 
On such a Sunday it is not a mere habit, it is a 
natural and healthy instinct, which makes us stand 
between the new year and the old, between the liv- 
ing and the dead, and listen to them as they speak 
to one another. Can we not almost hear the words 
they say, and is not their deepest burden something 
like this which 1 have tried to express ? The eld 
year says to the new year, u Take this man and show 
him greater things than I have been able to show 
him. You must be for him a richer, fuller day of 
the Lord than I could be." The new year says to the 
old, " I will take him and do for him the best that I 
can do. But all that I can do for him will be possi- 
ble only in virtue of the preparation which you have 
made, only because of what you have done for him 
already." 



358 J- he Great Expectation. 

We want to think then about men going forward 
to greater things, leaving the past, in hope and ex- 
pectation of a greater future. As I announce that 
subject, I can almost hear some cynical bystander 
say, " You may spare yourself the trouble of that 
sermon. For one half of your hearers it will be 
needless. For the other half it will be useless. The 
young people know without your telling them, know 
better than you can tell them, that the future is very 
great and glorious and splendid; and you will not 
convince the people who are no longer young that 
the future will be in any great way different from 
the past. Perhaps there are a few just trembling 
between youth and age, not having wholly lost the 
vision of the one nor gained the insight of the other, 
whom you may persuade to cling to their illusions a 
little longer; but is that really worth your while? 
By-and-by the eyes must open and the vision disap- 
pear, and then the monotony of life must be accepted, 
and the man give up all expectation of anything 
except running the same round of routine till he 
dies." 

I want at least to bear a protest against the 
mockery of such words as those, and to assert that 
that cry, "The Lord is at hand," may and ought to 
be in the ears of every man as he goes from the old 
year to the new. 

There are really two divisions of our subject. We 
may think first of the way in which a man becomes 
more conscious of the God who is already close to 
him, and second of the way in which God actually 



The Great Expectation. 359 

comes closer to him, year by year. They are what 
the philosophers would call the subjective and the 
objective thoughts of God's nearness. And we start 
with that which must be true, the assertion that the 
more varied and manifold a man's experiences have 
become, the more he has the chance to know of God, 
the more chance God has to show Himself to him. 
Every new experience is a new opportunity of know- 
ing God. Every experience is like a jewel set into 
the texture of our life, on which God shines and 
makes interpretation and revelation of himself. You 
hang a great rich dark cloth up into the sunlight, 
and the sun shines on it and shows the broad gen- 
eral color that is there. Then one by one you sew 
great precious stones upon the cloth, and each one, as 
you set it there, catches the sunlight and pours it 
forth in a flood of peculiar glory. A diamond here, 
an emerald there, an opal there, the sun seems to 
rejoice as he finds each moment a new interpreter of 
his splendor, until at last the whole jewelled cloth is 
burning and blazing with the gorgeous revelation. 

Now a much -living life, a life of manifold experi- 
ences, is like a robe which bursts forth of itself to 
jewels. They are sewn on from the outside. They 
burn out of its substance as the stars burn out of the 
heart of the night. And God shines with new rev- 
elation upon every one. And the man who feels 
himself going out of a dying year with these jewels 
of experience which have burned forth from his life 
during its months, and knowing that God in the New 
Year will shine upon them and reveal Himself by 



360 The Great Expectation. 

them, may well go full of expectation, saying, "The 
Lord is at hand." 

Life may be always expecting new sight of God, 
because life is always acquiring new experiences on 
which, through which, God may declare Hisnearness 
and His love. We may, if we will, turn the jewelled 
cloth away from the sun, but if we let him shine 
upon it, he must make himself known. To most of 
you — shall I not say to all of you? — have come in this 
past year, some new experiences, some things which 
you have never known before. Some of you have 
known for the first time what it is to be poor. 
Perhaps some of you have known for the first time 
what it is to be rich. Some of you have had your 
first sickness. Some of you have felt for the first 
time the keenest suffering in the death of your best 
beloved. Some of you have begun the new joy of 
family life. Some of you have become fathers or moth- 
ers. Some of you with yet deeper changes, which 
bore no outside witness of themselves, have laid hold 
upon new and inspiring ideas. Some of you have 
given yourselves up to a profession; some of you 
have made a new friend; some of you have entered 
into the communion of the Church and put on Jesus 
Christ. These are the jewels on the cloth of gold of 
your life. As you go forth, knowing that God must 
have something new of himself to show to you 
through these experiences as they become more and 
more set and fastened in your life as its habits and 
possessions, can you help being full of expectation ? 



The Great Expectation. 361 

Can you help saying to yourself : "The Lord is at 
hand"? 

Is there not something of the same kind when in 
the midst of some great experience you look forward 
to meeting again, with the power of that new exper- 
ience in you, your most noble and many-sided friend? 
" It may be," you say to yourself, " that this experi- 
ence will be the key which I have needed to unlock 
that closed chamber of his nature, before which I 
have so often stood and wondered." You see him 
coming to you, and new light streams forth from him. 
You have gained a new power of reflecting him. 
Henceforth your whole life with him is going to be 
a richer, deeper thing. Make this mutual ; let each 
of two friends, with multiplying experience, gain new 
power to reflect the other's light; and have you not 
the whole philosophy of deepening friendship, of the 
way in which those who are true friends become 
more and more to each other every year, the longer 
that they live ? 

A soul goes forth from this world and enters into 
heaven. Surely a part of that intensified and 
deepened sight of God which is to be its privilege 
and glory there, will lie in the abundance of experi- 
ence which it has accumulated here, and which will 
belong to it forever. Every treasured experience 
w T ill be to it like an eye with wdiich to gaze on God. 
We shall know him better forever and forever, be- 
cause of that success or this disappointment, because 
this friend played us false, or because the market 
turned just as our fortune was on the point of being 



362 The Great Expectation, 

made. Could anything make the events which hap- 
pen to us here on earth seem more interesting and 
significant than such a truth as that ? 

Thus much we say of the way in which the 
Lord is constantly coming by the ever increasing 
capacity, the ever multiplying experience of man, to 
discover and display more and more fully how near 
He is already. But this subjective interpretation 
is not all. There is the other, the objective side. 
We must pass to that. In these days man is so con- 
scious of himself, so large a portion of his time and 
thought is given to the consideration of himself, he is 
so aware of the fact of his own activity, that some- 
times it seems as if God were wholly passive, stand- 
ing off there and waiting for man to come to Him ; 
and meanwhile only making revelation of Himself to 
man as man turns to Him this or that side of his 
reflecting nature. Other times have been full of 
the truth of the activity of God. The Old Testa- 
ment is all alive with that idea, and constantly in 
history there have recurred ages full of the spirit of 
the Old Testament, which think of God as He was 
thought of in those vigorous and stirring books. 
That God is seeking after man, changing His meth- 
ods of treatment according to man's behavior, actual- 
ly coming nearer to or going farther off from man, 
not simply making Himself known as near or far, but 
actually changing from near to far, from far to near, 
that is the Old Testament truth; and the New Testa- 
ment, with the Incarnation for its light and glory, 
evidently has not lost or thrown away that truth. 



The Great Expectation. 36 



No religion can live and be thoroughly strong 
unless it keeps that truth of the activity of God. 
Some religions, like Calviaism, have kept it so strongly 
that they have lost or made little of the other truth, 
of the activity of man. In our time, as I said, man 
is so aware of himself, and of what he has to do, that 
there is sometimes danger lest he forget — sometimes 
he certainly has forgotten — the activity of God. 

Let us remember that great truth, and then, does 
not man's expectation of the future lift itself up and 
become wonderfully enlarged ? Not merely, I shall 
grow so that I shall be able to understand vastly 
more of what God is and of w r hat He is doing. God 
also will be ever doing new things. He is forever 
active. He has purposes concerning me which He 
has not yet unfolded. Therefore each year grows 
sacred with wondering expectation. Therefore I and 
the world may go forth from each old year into the 
new which follows it, certain that in that new year 
God will have for us some new treatment which 
will open for us some novel life. 

The world, as it looks back upon the past years, 
knows that God's active care for it has proved itself 
abundantly in all his various treatments. One year 
He lifted the curtain from a hidden continent, and 
gave his children a whole new world in which to 
carry out His purposes. Another year He revealed to 
them a strange, simple, little invention which made 
the treasured knowledge of the few to be the free 
heritage of all. Another year He touched the solid 
frame of a great spiritual despotism, and it trembled 



364 The Great Expectation. 

and quaked, and thousands of its slaves came forth 
free men. Another year, in our own time, in our own 
land, He sent the message of liberty to a nation of bond- 
men, and the fetters fell off from their limbs. We call 
these events of history. They have a right to be call- 
ed the comings of the Lord. They all are echoes and 
illustrations of that great coming of the Lord from 
which they who have known of it agree by instinc- 
tive consent to date their history, the birth of the 
child of Bethlehem, the Man of Nazareth and Cal- 
vary, into the world. 

When we once think thus of the events of history 
as the activities of God, as the comings of the Lord 
to man, then there comes a great vitality into the 
story of mankind. It is all alive. And then we 
stand before the yet unopened history of a new year, 
and say, " What will God do ? " Something of what 
he will do we can guess, as a child can guess some- 
thing of the future actions of the wisest man by intui- 
tions of his character ; but what we guess is very little 
and very vague. Still there is enough left on which 
to feed our wonder. What will God do this year? 
How will he come near to man ? It may be, that 
it might be ! that he will break up this awful slug- 
gishness of Christendom, this terrible torpidity of 
the Christian Church, and give us a great, true revi- 
val of religion. It may be that he will speak some 
great imperious command to the brutal and terrible 
spirit of war, and will open the gate upon a bright 
period of peace throughout the world. It maybe 
that he will draw back the curtain and throw some 



The Great Expectation. 365 

of his light upon the question, of how the poor and 
the rich may live together in more cordial brother- 
hood. It may be that he will lead up from the 
depths of their common faith a power of unity into 
the sects of a divided Christendom. Perhaps he will 
smite this selfishness of fashionable life, and make it 
earnest. Perhaps by some terrible catastrophe he 
will teach the nation that corruption is ruin, and 
that nothing but integrity can make any nation 
strong. Perhaps this ! perhaps that ! We make our 
guesses, and no man can truly say. Only we know 
that with a world that needs so much, and with a 
God who knows its needs and who loves it and 
pities it so tenderly, there must be in the long year 
some approach of His life to its life, some coming of 
the Lord ! 

And if we know this of the world, shall we not also 
know it of ourselves? For us too God is certainly 
active. We look forward into the opening months 
and we say, Yes, no doubt something will happen, 
some change will come. It may be one thing or 
another. It may be fuller life ; it may be death. It 
may be what we wish or what we dread. When we 
are young men we try to anticipate what is coming. 
As we grow to be older men we are very apt to give 
that up in hopelessness and merely wonder what will 
come. If we have no religion (or do not use the 
religion which we have, as many religious men do 
not), we think of what will happen as the falling of 
accidents or as the maturing of self-ripening pro- 
cesses. If we think of it at all religiously, we talk 



366 The Great Expectation. 

about God sending messages to us. If our religion 
is a real life thing, we feel God actually coming to us 
Himself, in all the unknown things which are to 
happen to us before another New Year's day. Ah, af- 
ter all, that is everything. To know that there is no 
accident. To know that indeed there is no such 
thing as a mere message of God. To know that He 
is always coming to us. To know that there is 
nothing happening to us which is not His coming. 
To know all that, is to find the most trivial life made 
solemn, the most cruel life made kind, the most sad 
and gloomy life made rich and beautiful. 

These are the two ways then in which the Lord 
comes, is always coming, to His servants. He opens 
their eyes to see how near He is already, and He does 
actually draw nearer to their lives. And now I must 
say a little about the other words of St. Paul in this 
text of ours, in which he describes what ought to be 
the result of chis expectation of the coming of the Lord 
upon a man's life. "Let your moderation be known 
unto all men. The Lord is at hand." Moderation ! 
Is not the word almost strange at first ? Does it not 
almost chill us? Moderation ! we cry. Nay, but in 
him whose soul is full of glorious expectation will 
not enthusiasm be the great condition ? Will not his 
soul expand and claim its larger heritage ? Will 
not those other words of Paul describe him to him- 
self: "All things are yours ! " W r ho shall talk to him 
of moderation ? What a hard, cold word it is ! 

But this word moderation — forbearance, the new 
version renders it — is one of St. Paul's great words. 



The Great Expectation. 367 

Men are known by their favorite words. And as 
Paul uses this word it has more meaning in it than 
we can put into any one single word by which we 
can translate it. Indeed it is one of those words 
descriptive of character, which have no hope of being 
understood except as they find a conception of the 
character which they try to describe already present 
in the mind of him to whom the description is given, 
and are able to point to it and to say: "That is 
what I mean." It is self-restraint, it is self-pos- 
session. 

There is — all man's self-knowledge has borne 
witness to it — there is somewhere in the human 
mind an image of human character in which all way- 
ward impulses are restrained, not by outside compul- 
sion, but by the firm grasp of a power which holds 
everything into obedience from within by the cen- 
tral purpose of the life. This character dreads fury 
and excitement as signs of feebleness. It hates ex- 
aggeration of statement, because exaggeration of 
statement means weakness of belief. It shrinks 
from self- display just in proportion as it accepts the 
responsibilities of selfhood. It is patient because it 
is powerful. It is tolerant because it is sure. It 
is hopeful for every man because it has found solid 
ground in the midst of the great turmoil for itself to 
stand on, and believes that all other men have the 
same right to solid ground to stand on as itself. It 
is this character, I think, which St. Paul calls by his 
great word moderation. It is self-possession. It is 
the self found and possessed in God. It is the sweet 



368 The Great Expectation. 

reasonableness which was in Jesus,of whom it was writ- 
ten that he should not strive nor cry, neither should 
his voice be heard in the streets ; that he should not 
break the bruised reed, and the smoking flax he 
should not quench until he sent forth judgment un- 
to victory. In these words I think we have the true 
description of what St. Paul means by moderation. 

In the midst of eager and sometimes frantic strug- 
gles after virtue and after power, is there not some- 
thing very great and refreshing in this setting up of 
moderation as the perfection of life ? Be yourself in 
God, it seems to say, and virtue and power will take 
care of themselves. 

And St. Paul says that this great self-possession in 
God must come to any man who really expects the 
coming of the Lord. 0, my dear friends, if you knew 
that in the most evident of all ways, which is by 
death, the Lord were coming to you to-morrow, and 
if you could be perfectly free from all base feel- 
ing, from fear and flurry, from defiance and from 
dread, from exaggerations and depressions belonging 
to that awful moment, if so you could calmly lie and 
listen while the great, quiet footsteps came nearer 
and nearer to your door, what would be the condition 
which it would make in you ? Would it be anything 
like this which I have tried to describe ? Would it 
be any elevation, refinement, solemnity, and broad- 
ening of life ? Would it be the calming of frivolity, 
the release of charity, the kindling of hope ? Would 
it not be all of these ? 

Not yet for us does that great solemn footfall sound 



The Great Expectation. 369 

outside the door. But none the less is the Lord at 
hand. I have preached to you in vain to-day unless 
I have made you feel that He is always at hand. All 
expectation may be expectation of Him. All expec- 
tation then ought, if Paul is right, to be the birth- 
place of this lofty character of moderation. And is 
it not? Tell me, what would you like to do for any 
friend of yours, or for your son, who was foolishly 
exuberant, overrunning into frivolities and quarrels 
and silly theories of life, into petulant discontent 
and all the base ambitions of the hour ? What would 
you like to do to save him ? Would you not be sure 
that if you only could set a noble expectation before 
him, and give it dominion over his whole soul, he 
would certainly be saved ? 

That is St. Paul's doctrine ! There is salvation for 
us all. Oh friends, the old year is fast slipping back 
behind us. We cannot stay in it if we would. We 
must go forth and leave our past. Let us go forth no- 
bly. Let us go as those whom greater thoughts, and 
greater deeds await beyond. Let us go humbly, sol- 
emnly, bravely, as those must go who go to meet the 
Lord. With firm, quiet, serious steps, full of faith, 
full of hope, let us go to meet Him who will certainly 
judge us when we meet him, but who loves us while 
he judges us, and who, if we are only obedient, will 
make us by the discipline of all the years, fit for the 
everlasting world, where life shall count itself by 
years no longer. 
24 



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